FreeBSD Man Pages

if_ti(4)

NAME

     ti -- Alteon Networks Tigon I and Tigon II Gigabit Ethernet driver

SYNOPSIS

     device ti
     options TI_PRIVATE_JUMBOS
     options TI_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT

DESCRIPTION

     The ti driver provides support for PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on
     the Alteon Networks Tigon Gigabit Ethernet controller chip.  The Tigon
     contains an embedded R4000 CPU, gigabit MAC, dual DMA channels and a PCI
     interface unit.  The Tigon II contains two R4000 CPUs and other refine-
     ments.  Either chip can be used in either a 32-bit or 64-bit PCI slot.
     Communication with the chip is achieved via PCI shared memory and bus
     master DMA.  The Tigon I and II support hardware multicast address fil-
     tering, VLAN tag extraction and insertion, and jumbo Ethernet frames
     sizes up to 9000 bytes.  Note that the Tigon I chipset is no longer in
     active production: all new adapters should come equipped with Tigon II
     chipsets.

     While the Tigon chipset supports 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds, support for
     10 and 100Mbps speeds is only available on boards with the proper trans-
     ceivers.  Most adapters are only designed to work at 1000Mbps, however
     the driver should support those NICs that work at lower speeds as well.

     Support for jumbo frames is provided via the interface MTU setting.
     Selecting an MTU larger than 1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility con-
     figures 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.

     Header splitting support for Tigon 2 boards (this option has no effect
     for the Tigon 1) can be turned on with the TI_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT option.  See
     zero_copy(9) for more discussion on zero copy receive and header split-
     ting.

     The ti driver normally uses jumbo receive buffers allocated by the
     jumbo(9) buffer allocator, but can be configured to use its own private
     pool of jumbo buffers that are contiguous instead of buffers from the
     jumbo allocator, which are made up of multiple page sized chunks.	To
     turn on private jumbos, use the TI_PRIVATE_JUMBOS option.

     Support for vlans is also available using the vlan(4) mechanism.  See the
     vlan(4) man page for more details.

     The ti 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 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.


     full-duplex	   Force full duplex operation

     half-duplex	   Force half duplex operation.

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

HARDWARE

     The ti driver supports Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on the Alteon
     Tigon I and II chips.  The ti driver has been tested with the following
     adapters:

     o	 3Com 3c985-SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter (Tigon 1)
     o	 3Com 3c985B-SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter (Tigon 2)
     o	 Alteon AceNIC V Gigabit Ethernet adapter (1000baseSX)
     o	 Alteon AceNIC V Gigabit Ethernet adapter (1000baseT)
     o	 Digital EtherWORKS 1000SX PCI Gigabit adapter
     o	 Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter (1000baseSX)
     o	 Netgear GA620T Gigabit Ethernet adapter (1000baseT)

     The following adapters should also be supported but have not yet been
     tested:

     o	 Asante GigaNIX1000T Gigabit Ethernet adapter
     o	 Asante PCI 1000BASE-SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter
     o	 Farallon PN9000SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter
     o	 NEC Gigabit Ethernet
     o	 Silicon Graphics PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter

IOCTLS

     In addition to the standard socket(2) ioctl(2) calls implemented by most
     network drivers, the ti driver also includes a character device interface
     that can be used for additional diagnostics, configuration and debugging.
     With this character device interface, and a specially patched version of
     gdb(1), the user can debug firmware running on the Tigon board.

     These ioctls and their arguments are defined in the <sys/tiio.h> header
     file.

     TIIOCGETSTATS     Return card statistics DMAed from the card into kernel
		       memory approximately every 2 seconds.  (That time
		       interval can be changed via the TIIOCSETPARAMS ioctl.)
		       The argument is struct ti_stats.

     TIIOCGETPARAMS    Get various performance-related firmware parameters
		       that largely affect how interrupts are coalesced.  The
		       argument is struct ti_params.

     TIIOCSETPARAMS    Set various performance-related firmware parameters
		       that largely affect how interrupts are coalesced.  The
		       argument is struct ti_params.

     TIIOCSETTRACE     Tell the NIC to trace the requested types of informa-
		       tion.  The argument is ti_trace_type.

     TIIOCGETTRACE     Dump the trace buffer from the card.  The argument is
		       struct ti_trace_buf.


     ALT_WRITE_TG_MEM  Write to the requested memory region on the Tigon
		       board.  The argument is struct tg_mem.

     ALT_READ_TG_REG   Read the requested register on the Tigon board.	The
		       argument is struct tg_reg.

     ALT_WRITE_TG_REG  Write to the requested register on the Tigon board.
		       The argument is struct tg_reg.

FILES

     /dev/ti[0-255]  Tigon driver character interface.

DIAGNOSTICS

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

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

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

     ti%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.

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

     ti%d: bios thinks we're in a 64 bit slot, but we aren't  The BIOS has
     programmed the NIC as though it had been installed in a 64-bit PCI slot,
     but in fact the NIC is in a 32-bit slot.  This happens as a result of a
     bug in some BIOSes.  This can be worked around on the Tigon II, but on
     the Tigon I initialization will fail.

     ti%d: board self-diagnostics failed!  The ROMFAIL bit in the CPU state
     register was set after system startup, indicating that the on-board NIC
     diagnostics failed.

     ti%d: unknown hwrev  The driver detected a board with an unsupported
     hardware revision.  The ti driver supports revision 4 (Tigon 1) and revi-
     sion 6 (Tigon 2) chips and has firmware only for those devices.

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

SEE ALSO

     arp(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8), jumbo(9),
     zero_copy(9)

     Alteon Gigabit Ethernet/PCI NIC manuals,
     http://sanjose.alteon.com/open.shtml.

HISTORY

     The ti device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

AUTHORS

     The ti driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@bsdi.com>.  The header
     splitting firmware modifications, character ioctl(2) interface and debug-

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