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if_rl(4)

NAME

     rl -- RealTek 8129/8139 Fast Ethernet device driver

SYNOPSIS

     device miibus
     device rl

DESCRIPTION

     The rl driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
     controllers based on the RealTek 8129 and 8139 Fast Ethernet controller
     chips.

     The RealTek 8129/8139 series controllers use bus master DMA but do not
     use a descriptor-based data transfer mechanism.  The receiver uses a sin-
     gle fixed size ring buffer from which packets must be copied into mbufs.
     For transmission, there are only four outbound packet address registers
     which require all outgoing packets to be stored as contiguous buffers.
     Furthermore, outbound packet buffers must be longword aligned or else
     transmission will fail.

     The 8129 differs from the 8139 in that the 8139 has an internal PHY which
     is controlled through special direct access registers whereas the 8129
     uses an external PHY via an MII bus.  The 8139 supports both 10 and
     100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.  The 8129 can support the
     same speeds and modes given an appropriate PHY chip.

     Note: support for the 8139C+ chip is provided by the re(4) driver.

     The rl driver supports the following media types:

     autoselect 	   Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
			   This is only supported if the PHY chip attached to
			   the RealTek controller supports NWAY autonegotia-
			   tion.  The user can manually override the autose-
			   lected mode by adding media options to the
			   /etc/rc.conf file.

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

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

     The rl driver supports the following media options:

     full-duplex	   Force full duplex operation

     half-duplex	   Force half duplex operation.

     Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported by the
     adapter.  For more information on configuring this device, see
     ifconfig(8).

HARDWARE

     Adapters supported by the rl driver include:
     o	 Corega FEther CB-TXD
     o	 Corega FEtherII CB-TXD
     o	 D-Link DFE-528TX
     o	 D-Link DFE-530TX+
     o	 D-Link DFE-538TX
     o	 D-Link DFE-690TXD
     o	 Edimax EP-4103DL CardBus
     o	 Encore ENL832-TX 10/100 M PCI
     o	 Farallon NetLINE 10/100 PCI
     o	 Genius GF100TXR,
     o	 GigaFast Ethernet EE100-AXP
     o	 KTX-9130TX 10/100 Fast Ethernet
     o	 LevelOne FPC-0106TX
     o	 Longshine LCS-8038TX-R
     o	 NDC Communications NE100TX-E
     o	 Netronix Inc. EA-1210 NetEther 10/100
     o	 Nortel Networks 10/100BaseTX
     o	 OvisLink LEF-8129TX
     o	 OvisLink LEF-8139TX
     o	 Peppercon AG ROL-F
     o	 Planex FNW-3800-TX
     o	 SMC EZ Card 10/100 PCI 1211-TX
     o	 SOHO (PRAGMATIC) UE-1211C

DIAGNOSTICS

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

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

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

     rl%d: no memory for rx list  The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for
     the receiver ring.

     rl%d: no memory for tx list  The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for
     the transmitter ring when allocating a pad buffer or collapsing an mbuf
     chain into a cluster.

     rl%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0  This message applies
     only to adapters which support power management.  Some operating systems
     place the controller in low power mode when shutting down, and some PCI
     BIOSes fail to bring the chip out of this state before configuring it.
     The controller loses all of its PCI configuration in the D3 state, so if
     the BIOS does not set it back to full power mode in time, it won't be
     able to configure it correctly.  The driver tries to detect this condi-
     tion and bring the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state, but this
     may not be enough to return the driver to a fully operational condition.
     If you see this message at boot time and the driver fails to attach the
     device as a network interface, you will have to perform second warm boot
     to have the device properly configured.

     Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another oper-
     ating system.  If you power down your system prior to booting FreeBSD,
     the card should be configured correctly.

SEE ALSO

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

BUGS

     Since outbound packets must be longword aligned, the transmit routine has
     to copy an unaligned packet into an mbuf cluster buffer before transmis-
     sion.  The driver abuses the fact that the cluster buffer pool is allo-
     cated at system startup time in a contiguous region starting at a page
     boundary.	Since cluster buffers are 2048 bytes, they are longword
     aligned by definition.  The driver probably should not be depending on
     this characteristic.

     The RealTek data sheets are of especially poor quality, and there is a
     lot of information missing particularly concerning the receiver opera-
     tion.  One particularly important fact that the data sheets fail to men-
     tion relates to the way in which the chip fills in the receive buffer.
     When an interrupt is posted to signal that a frame has been received, it
     is possible that another frame might be in the process of being copied
     into the receive buffer while the driver is busy handling the first one.
     If the driver manages to finish processing the first frame before the
     chip is done DMAing the rest of the next frame, the driver may attempt to
     process the next frame in the buffer before the chip has had a chance to
     finish DMAing all of it.

     The driver can check for an incomplete frame by inspecting the frame
     length in the header preceding the actual packet data: an incomplete
     frame will have the magic length of 0xFFF0.  When the driver encounters
     this value, it knows that it has finished processing all currently avail-
     able packets.  Neither this magic value nor its significance are docu-
     mented anywhere in the RealTek data sheets.

FreeBSD 5.4		       November 24, 2004		   FreeBSD 5.4

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