path: root/share/man/man4/rl.4

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.\"	Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>. All rights reserved.
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.\"	$FreeBSD: rl.4,v 1.7 1998/12/24 18:52:47 wpaul Exp $
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.Dd $Mdocdate: July 16 2013 $
.Dt RL 4
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm rl
.Nd Realtek 8129/8139 10/100 Ethernet device
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Cd "rl* at pci?"
.Cd "rl* at cardbus?"
.Cd "rlphy* at mii?"
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
controllers based on the Realtek 8129 and 8139 Fast Ethernet controller
chips.
This includes, among others, the following cards:
.Pp
.Bl -item -offset indent -compact
.It
Accton MPX5030 CardBus
.It
Allied Telesyn AT2550
.It
Corega FEther CB-TXD 10/100 Ethernet
.It
D-Link DFE-520TX C1, DFE-530TX+, DFE-538TX, DFE-690TXD
.It
Encore ENL832-TX-RENT 10/100 M PCI
.It
Genius GF100TXR
.It
KTX-9130TX 10/100 Fast Ethernet
.It
Longshine LCS-8038TX-R
.It
NDC Communications NE100TX-E
.It
Netgear FA311 v2
.It
Netronix Inc. EA-1210 NetEther 10/100
.It
Nortel BayStack 21
.It
OvisLink LEF-8129TX, LEF-8139TX
.It
SMC EZ Card 10/100 PCI 1211-TX
.It
TRENDnet TE100-PCBUSR CardBus
.El
.Pp
The Realtek controllers use bus master DMA but do not use a
descriptor-based data transfer mechanism.
The receiver uses a single fixed size ring buffer from which packets must be
copied into mbufs.
For transmission, there are only four outbound packet
address registers which require all outgoing packets to be stored
as contiguous buffers.
Furthermore, outbound packet buffers must be longword aligned or else
transmission will fail.
.Pp
The 8129 differs from the 8139 in that the 8139 has an internal
PHY which is controlled through special direct access registers
whereas the 8129 uses an external PHY via an MII bus.
The 8139 supports both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.
The 8129 can support the same speeds and modes given an appropriate
PHY chip.
.Pp
The
.Nm
driver supports the following media types:
.Bl -tag -width full-duplex
.It autoselect
Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
This is only supported if the PHY chip attached to the Realtek controller
supports NWAY autonegotiation.
The user can manually override the autoselected mode by adding media options
to the appropriate
.Xr hostname.if 5
file.
.It 10baseT
Set 10Mbps operation.
The
.Ar mediaopt
option can also be used to select either
.Ar full-duplex
or
.Ar half-duplex
modes.
.It 100baseTX
Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.
The
.Ar mediaopt
option can also be used to select either
.Ar full-duplex
or
.Ar half-duplex
modes.
.El
.Pp
The
.Nm
driver supports the following media options:
.Bl -tag -width full-duplex
.It full-duplex
Force full duplex operation.
.It half-duplex
Force half duplex operation.
.El
.Pp
Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported
by the adapter.
For more information on configuring this device, see
.Xr ifconfig 8 .
.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
.Bl -diag
.It "rl0: couldn't map memory"
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
.It "rl0: couldn't map interrupt"
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
.It "rl0: watchdog timeout"
The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with
the network connection (cable).
.It "rl0: no memory for rx list"
The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.
.It "rl0: 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.
.El
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr arp 4 ,
.Xr ifmedia 4 ,
.Xr intro 4 ,
.Xr netintro 4 ,
.Xr rlphy 4 ,
.Xr hostname.if 5 ,
.Xr ifconfig 8
.Rs
.%B The Realtek 8129 and 8139 datasheets
.%O ftp.realtek.com.tw:/lancard/data sheet
.Re
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm
device driver first appeared in
.Fx 3.0 .
.Ox
support first appeared in
.Ox 2.5 .
.Sh AUTHORS
The
.Nm
driver was written by
.An Bill Paul Aq Mt wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu .
.Sh BUGS
Since outbound packets must be longword aligned, the transmit
routine has to copy an unaligned packet into an mbuf cluster buffer
before transmission.
The driver abuses the fact that the cluster buffer
pool is allocated at system startup time in a contiguous region starting
at a page boundary.
Since cluster buffers are 2048 bytes, they are
longword aligned by definition.
The driver probably should not be
depending on this characteristic.
.Pp
The Realtek data sheets are of especially poor quality: the grammar
and spelling are awful and there is a lot of information missing,
particularly concerning the receiver operation.
One particularly important fact that the data sheets fail to mention
relates to the way in which the chip fills in the receive buffer.
When an interrupt is posted to signal that a frame has been received,
it is possible that another frame might be in the process of being
copied into the receive buffer while the driver is busy handling
the first one.
If the driver
manages to finish processing the first frame before the chip is done
DMAing the rest of the next frame, the driver may attempt to process
the next frame in the buffer before the chip has had a chance to finish
DMAing all of it.
.Pp
The driver can check for an incomplete frame by inspecting the frame
length in the header preceding the actual packet data: an incomplete
frame will have the magic length of 0xFFF0.
When the driver encounters this value, it knows that it has finished
processing all currently available packets.
Neither this magic value nor its significance are
documented anywhere in the Realtek data sheets.