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NGE(4)                DragonFly Kernel Interfaces Manual                NGE(4)


NAME

     nge - National Semiconductor PCI gigabit ethernet adapter driver


SYNOPSIS

     device miibus
     device nge


DESCRIPTION

     The nge driver provides support for various NICs based on the National
     Semiconductor DP83820 and DP83821 gigabit ethernet controller chips,
     including the following:

     *   SMC EZ Card 1000 (SMC9462TX)
     *   D-Link DGE-500T
     *   Asante FriendlyNet GigaNIX 1000TA and 1000TPC
     *   Addtron AEG320T
     *   LinkSys EG1032 (32-bit PCI) and EG1064 (64-bit PCI)
     *   Surecom Technology EP-320G-TX
     *   Netgear GA621
     *   Netgear GA622T

     All of these NICs are capable of 10, 100 and 1000mbps speeds over CAT5
     copper cable.  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 also supports 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.

     1000baseT    Set 1000baseT 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.

     The nge driver also supports one special link option for 1000baseT cards:

     link0  With 1000baseT cards, establishing a link between two ports
            requires that one port be configured as a master and the other a
            slave.  With autonegotiation, the master/slave settings will be
            chosen automatically.  However when manually selecting the link
            state, it is necessary to force one side of the link to be a
            master and the other a slave.  The nge driver configures the ports
            as slaves by default.  Setting the link0 flag with ifconfig(8)
            will set a port as a master instead.

     For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).  The
     nge driver supports polling(4).


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

     arp(4), ifmedia(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>.

DragonFly 5.9-DEVELOPMENT        May 11, 2001        DragonFly 5.9-DEVELOPMENT

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