NAME

       nge — National Semiconductor PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver

SYNOPSIS

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

             device miibus
             device nge

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

             if_nge_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

       The  nge driver provides support for various NICs based on the National Semiconductor DP83820 and DP83821
       Gigabit Ethernet controller chips.

       The DP83820 supports TBI (ten bit interface) and GMII transceivers, which  means  it  can  be  used  with
       either  copper  or  1000baseX  fiber applications.  The DP83820 supports TCP/IP checksum offload and VLAN
       tagging/insertion as well as a 2048-bit multicast hash filter and up to 4 pattern match buffers.

       Most  cards  also  use  the  DP83861  10/100/1000  copper  gigabit  transceiver  chip,   which   supports
       autonegotiation of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps modes in full or half duplex.

       The DP83820 and DP83821 also support jumbo frames, which can be configured via the interface MTU setting.
       Selecting  an  MTU  larger than 1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility configures 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.

       The nge 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 rc.conf(5).

       10baseT/UTP  Set  10Mbps  operation.   The  ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to select either
                    full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

       100baseTX    Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.  The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used  to
                    select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

       1000baseTX   Set  1000baseTX  operation  over  twisted  pair.   full-duplex  and  half-duplex  modes  are
                    supported.

       1000baseSX   Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) operation.   Both  full-duplex  and  half-duplex  modes  are
                    supported.

       The nge driver supports the following media options:

       full-duplex  Force full duplex operation.

       half-duplex  Force half duplex operation.

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

HARDWARE

       The  nge  driver  supports  National  Semiconductor  DP83820  and DP83821 based Gigabit Ethernet adapters
       including:

       •   Addtron AEG320T
       •   Ark PC SOHO-GA2500T (32-bit PCI) and SOHO-GA2000T (64-bit PCI)
       •   Asante FriendlyNet GigaNIX 1000TA and 1000TPC
       •   D-Link DGE-500T
       •   Linksys EG1032, revision 1
       •   Netgear GA621
       •   Netgear GA622T
       •   SMC EZ Card 1000 (SMC9462TX)
       •   Surecom Technology EP-320G-TX
       •   Trendware TEG-PCITX (32-bit PCI) and TEG-PCITX2 (64-bit PCI)

SYSCTL VARIABLES

       The following variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and loader(8) tunables:

       dev.nge.%d.int_holdoff
               Maximum amount of time to delay interrupt processing in units of 100us.  The accepted range is  0
               to  255,  the  default  is  1(100us).  Value 0 completely disables the interrupt moderation.  The
               interface has to be brought down and up again before a change takes effect.

DIAGNOSTICS

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

       nge%d: couldn't map ports  A fatal initialization error has occurred.

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

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

       nge%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.

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

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

SEE ALSO

       altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), polling(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)

       National Semiconductor DP83820 datasheet, http://www.national.com.

       National Semiconductor DP83861 datasheet, http://www.national.com.

HISTORY

       The nge device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.4.

AUTHORS

       The nge driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@bsdi.com>.

Debian                                          November 23, 2010                                         NGE(4)