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vx(4)

SYNOPSIS

     device vx

DESCRIPTION

     The vx driver provides support for the 3Com ``Vortex'' chipset.

     The medium selection can be influenced by the following link flags to the
     ifconfig(8) command:

     link0   Use the AUI port.
     link1   Use the BNC port.
     link2   Use the UTP port.

HARDWARE

     The vx driver supports the following cards:

     o	 3Com 3c590 EtherLink III PCI
     o	 3Com 3c592 EtherLink III EISA
     o	 3Com 3c595 Fast EtherLink III PCI in 10 Mbps mode
     o	 3Com 3c597 Fast EtherLink III EISA in 10 Mbps mode

DIAGNOSTICS

     vx%d: not configured; kernel is built for only %d devices.  There are not
     enough devices in the kernel configuration file for the number of
     adapters present in the system.  Add devices to the configuration file,
     rebuild the kernel, and reboot.

     All other diagnostics indicate either a hardware problem or a bug in the
     driver.

CAVEATS

     Some early-revision 3c590 cards are defective and suffer from many
     receive overruns, which cause lost packets.  The author has attempted to
     implement a test for it based on the information supplied by 3Com, but
     the test resulted mostly in spurious warnings.

     The performance of this driver is somewhat limited by the fact that it
     uses only polled-mode I/O and does not make use of the bus-mastering
     capability of the cards.

BUGS

     The vx driver is known not to reset the adapter correctly following a
     warm boot on some systems.

     The vx driver has not been exhaustively tested with all the models of
     cards that it claims to support.

SEE ALSO

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

HISTORY

     The vx device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.  It was derived from
     the ep driver, from which it inherits most of its limitations.

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