NAME

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

SYNOPSIS

       To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:

             device miibus
             device vr

       Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):

             if_vr_load="YES"

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 downloading 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  Ethernet)  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:

       •   AOpen/Acer ALN-320
       •   D-Link DFE520-TX
       •   D-Link DFE530-TX
       •   Hawking Technologies PN102TX
       •   Soekris Engineering net5501

SYSCTL VARIABLES

       The following variables are available as sysctl(8) variables:

       dev.vr.%d.stats
               Display lots of useful MAC counters maintained in the driver.

DIAGNOSTICS

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

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

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

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

       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 will not be able to configure it correctly.  The driver tries to detect this condition 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 operating system.  If you power  down
       your system prior to booting FreeBSD, the card should be configured correctly.

SEE ALSO

       altq(4), 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 cannot be avoided.   On  faster  machines  (e.g.  a  Pentium  II),  the
       performance impact is much less noticeable.

Debian                                          February 25, 2012                                          VR(4)