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vr(4)

NAME

     vr -- VIA Technologies Rhine I/II/III Ethernet device driver

SYNOPSIS

     device miibus
     device vr

DESCRIPTION

     The vr driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
     controllers based on the VIA Technologies VT3043 Rhine I, VT86C100A Rhine
     II, and VT6105/VT6105M Rhine III Fast Ethernet controller chips.

     The VIA Rhine chips use bus master DMA and have a descriptor layout
     designed to resemble that of the DEC 21x4x ``tulip'' chips.  The register
     layout is different however and the receive filter in the Rhine chips is
     much simpler and is programmed through registers rather than by download-
     ing a special setup frame through the transmit DMA engine.  Transmit and
     receive DMA buffers must be longword aligned.  The Rhine chips are meant
     to be interfaced with external physical layer devices via an MII bus.
     They support both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.

     The vr 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.

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

     The vr 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

     The vr driver supports VIA Technologies Rhine I, Rhine II, and Rhine III
     based Fast Ethernet adapters including:

     o	 D-Link DFE530-TX
     o	 Hawking Technologies PN102TX
     o	 AOpen/Acer ALN-320

DIAGNOSTICS

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

     vr%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.

     vr%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)

     The VIA Technologies VT86C100A data sheet, http://www.via.com.tw.

HISTORY

     The vr device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

AUTHORS

     The vr driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>.

BUGS

     The vr driver always copies transmit mbuf chains into longword-aligned
     buffers prior to transmission in order to pacify the Rhine chips.	If
     buffers are not aligned correctly, the chip will round the supplied
     buffer address and begin DMAing from the wrong location.  This buffer
     copying impairs transmit performance on slower systems but can't be
     avoided.  On faster machines (e.g. a Pentium II), the performance impact
     is much less noticeable.

FreeBSD 5.4		       November 24, 2004		   FreeBSD 5.4

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