FreeBSD Man Pages

wb(4)

NAME

     wb -- Winbond W89C840F Fast Ethernet device driver

SYNOPSIS

     device miibus
     device wb

DESCRIPTION

     The wb driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
     controllers based on the Winbond W89C840F Fast Ethernet controller chip.
     The 840F should not be confused with the 940F, which is an NE2000 clone
     and only supports 10Mbps speeds.

     The Winbond controller uses bus master DMA and is designed to be a DEC
     'tulip' workalike.  It differs from the standard DEC design in several
     ways: the control and status registers are spaced 4 bytes apart instead
     of 8, and the receive filter is programmed through registers rather than
     by downloading a special setup frame via the transmit DMA engine.	Using
     an external PHY, the Winbond chip supports both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in
     either full or half duplex.

     The wb 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 Winbond 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 wb 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 wb driver supports Winbond W89C840F based Fast Ethernet adapters and
     embedded controllers including:

     o	 Trendware TE100-PCIE

DIAGNOSTICS

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

     wb%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.

     wb%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), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

     The wb device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

AUTHORS

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

BUGS

     The Winbond chip seems to behave strangely in some cases when the link
     partner switches modes.  If for example both sides are set to 10Mbps
     half-duplex, and the other end is changed to 100Mbps full-duplex, the
     Winbond's receiver suddenly starts writing trash all over the RX descrip-
     tors.  The wb driver handles this by forcing a reset of both the con-
     troller chip and attached PHY.  This is drastic, but it appears to be the
     only way to recover properly from this condition.

FreeBSD 5.4		       September 4, 2004		   FreeBSD 5.4

SPONSORED LINKS