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AE(4)                 DragonFly Kernel Interfaces Manual                 AE(4)


NAME

     ae -- Attansic/Atheros L2 FastEthernet controller driver


SYNOPSIS

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

           device miibus
           device ae

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

           if_ae_load="YES"


DESCRIPTION

     The ae device driver provides support for Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe
     FastEthernet controllers.

     The controller supports hardware Ethernet checksum processing, hardware
     VLAN tag stripping/insertion and an interrupt moderation mechanism.
     Attansic L2 also features a 64-bit multicast hash filter.

     The ae 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  Select 10Mbps operation.

     100baseTX    Set 100Mbps (FastEthernet) operation.

     The ae driver provides support for 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 ae driver supports Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers,
     and is known to support the following hardware:

     o   ASUS EeePC 701
     o   ASUS EeePC 900

     Other hardware may or may not work with this driver.


SYSCTL VARIABLES

     The ae driver collects a number of useful MAC counter during the work.
     The statistics is available via the dev.ae.%d.stats sysctl(8) tree, where
     %d corresponds to the controller number.


DIAGNOSTICS

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

     ae%d: reset timeout.  The card reset operation has been timed out.

     ae%d: Generating random ethernet address.  No valid ethernet address was
     found neither in the controller registers not in NVRAM.  Random locally
     administered address with ASUS OUI identifier will be used instead.


SEE ALSO

     arp(4), ifmedia(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4),
     ifconfig(8)


HISTORY

     The ae driver and this manual page were written by Stanislav Sedov
     <stas@FreeBSD.org>.  It first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1.


BUGS

     The Attansic L2 FastEthernet contoller supports DMA but do not use a
     descriptor based transfer mechanism via scatter-gather DMA.  Thus the
     data should be copied to/from the controller memory on each
     transmit/receive.  Furthermore, a lot of data alignment restrictions
     apply.  This may introduce a high CPU load on systems with heavy network
     activity.  Luckily enough this should not be a problem on modern hardware
     as L2 does not support speeds faster than 100Mbps.

DragonFly 4.1                  November 28, 2014                 DragonFly 4.1

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