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if_bge(4)

NAME

     bge -- Broadcom BCM570x/5721/5750/5751 PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter
     driver

SYNOPSIS

     device miibus
     device bge

DESCRIPTION

     The bge driver provides support for various NICs based on the Broadcom
     BCM570x, 5721, 5750 and 5751 families of Gigabit Ethernet controller
     chips.

     All of these NICs are capable of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds over CAT5
     copper cable, except for the SysKonnect SK-9D41 which supports only
     1000Mbps over multimode fiber.  The BCM570x builds upon the technology of
     the Alteon Tigon II.  It has two R4000 CPU cores and is PCI v2.2 and PCI-
     X v1.0 compliant.	It supports IP, TCP and UDP checksum offload for both
     receive and transmit, multiple RX and TX DMA rings for QoS applications,
     rules-based receive filtering, and VLAN tag stripping/insertion as well
     as a 256-bit multicast hash filter.  Additional features may be provided
     via value-add firmware updates.  The BCM570x supports TBI (ten bit inter-
     face) and GMII transceivers, which means it can be used with either cop-
     per or 1000baseX fiber applications.  Note however the device only sup-
     ports a single speed in TBI mode.

     Most BCM5700-based cards also use the Broadcom BCM5401 or BCM5411
     10/100/1000 copper gigabit transceivers, which support autonegotiation of
     10, 100 and 1000Mbps modes in full or half duplex.

     The BCM570x also supports jumbo frames, which can be configured via the
     interface MTU setting.  Selecting an MTU larger than 1500 bytes with the
     ifconfig(8) utility configures the adapter to receive and transmit jumbo
     frames.  Using jumbo frames can greatly improve performance for certain
     tasks, such as file transfers and data streaming.

     The bge driver supports the following media types:

     autoselect   Enable autoselection of the media type and options.  The
		  user can manually override the autoselected mode by adding
		  media options to rc.conf(5).

     10baseT/UTP  Set 10Mbps operation.  The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can
		  also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex
		  modes.

     100baseTX	  Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.  The ifconfig(8)
		  mediaopt option can also be used to select either
		  full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

     1000baseTX   Set 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair.  Only
		  full-duplex mode is supported.

     1000baseSX   Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) operation.  Both full-duplex
		  and half-duplex modes are supported.

     The bge driver supports the following media options:
     link0  With 1000baseTX cards, establishing a link between two ports
	    requires that one port be configured as a master and the other a
	    slave.  With autonegotiation, the master/slave settings will be
	    chosen automatically.  However when manually selecting the link
	    state, it is necessary to force one side of the link to be a mas-
	    ter and the other a slave.	The bge driver configures the ports as
	    slaves by default.	Setting the link0 flag with ifconfig(8) will
	    set a port as a master instead.

     For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

HARDWARE

     The bge driver provides support for various NICs based on the Broadcom
     BCM570x family of Gigabit Ethernet controller chips, including the fol-
     lowing:

     o	 3Com 3c996-T (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 Dell PowerEdge 1750 integrated BCM5704C NIC (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 Dell PowerEdge 2550 integrated BCM5700 NIC (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 Dell PowerEdge 2650 integrated BCM5703 NIC (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 IBM x235 server integrated BCM5703x NIC (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 HP ProLiant NC7760 embedded Gigabit NIC (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 HP ProLiant NC7770 PCI-X Gigabit NIC (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 HP ProLiant NC7781 embedded PCI-X Gigabit NIC (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 Netgear GA302T (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 SysKonnect SK-9D21 (10/100/1000baseTX)
     o	 SysKonnect SK-9D41 (1000baseSX)

DIAGNOSTICS

     bge%d: couldn't map memory  A fatal initialization error has occurred.

     bge%d: couldn't map ports	A fatal initialization error has occurred.

     bge%d: couldn't map interrupt  A fatal initialization error has occurred.

     bge%d: no memory for softc struct!  The driver failed to allocate memory
     for per-device instance information during initialization.

     bge%d: failed to enable memory mapping!  The driver failed to initialize
     PCI shared memory mapping.  This might happen if the card is not in a
     bus-master slot.

     bge%d: no memory for jumbo buffers!  The driver failed to allocate memory
     for jumbo frames during initialization.

     bge%d: watchdog timeout  The device has stopped responding to the net-
     work, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).

SEE ALSO

     arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

     The bge device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.5.

AUTHORS

     The bge driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@windriver.com>.

FreeBSD 5.4		       December 16, 2004		   FreeBSD 5.4

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