NAME

vte — Vortex86 RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet driver

SYNOPSIS

To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:
device miibus
device vte
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5): 
if_vte_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The vte device driver provides support for RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet controller which is commonly found on Vortex86 System On a Chip (SoC).
The RDC R6040 has integrated 10/100 PHY for 10/100Mbps support in full or half-duplex. The controller supports interrupt moderation mechanism, a 64-bit multicast hash filter, VLAN over-size frame and four station addresses. The vte device driver uses three station addresses out of four as perfect multicast filter.
The vte 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.
100baseTX
Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.
The vte 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 vte device driver provides support for the following Ethernet controllers:
  • DM&P Vortex86 RDC R6040 Fast Ethernet controller

LOADER TUNABLES

Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf(5).
hw.vte.tx_deep_copy
The RDC R6040 controller has no auto-padding support for short frames and the controller's DMA engine does not have capability to handle multiple buffers for a TX frame such that driver has to create a single contiguous TX buffer. This hardware limitation leads to poor TX performance since most of CPU cycles are wasted on both de-fragmenting mbuf chains and padding. This tunable enables deep copy operation for TX frames such that driver will spend less CPU cycles in de-fragmentation with the cost of extra TX buffer memory. The default value is 1 to use deep copy.

SYSCTL VARIABLES

The following variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and loader(8) tunables:
dev.vte.%d.rx_mod
Maximum number of packets to fire RX completion interrupt. The accepted range is 0 to 15, the default is 15.
dev.vte.%d.tx_mod
Maximum number of packets to fire TX completion interrupt. The accepted range is 0 to 15, the default is 15.
dev.vte.%d.stats
Show hardware MAC statistics maintained in driver.

SEE ALSO

altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)
DM&P Electronics Inc. Vortex86, http://www.dmp.com.tw.

HISTORY

The vte driver was written by Pyun YongHyeon <[email protected]>. It first appeared in FreeBSD 8.3.