NAME

rl - RealTek 8129/8139 fast ethernet device driver

SYNOPSIS

device rl

DESCRIPTION

The rl driver provides support for PCI ethernet adapters and embedded

controllers based on the RealTek 8129 and 8139 fast ethernet controller

chips. This includes the Allied Telesyn AT2550, Genius GF100TXR, NDC

Communications NE100TX-E, OvisLink LEF-8129TX, OvisLink LEF-8139TX,

Netronix Inc. EA-1210 NetEther 10/100, KTX-9130TX 10/100 Fast Ethernet,

Encore ENL832-TX 10/100 M PCI, Longshine LCS-8038TX-R, the SMC EZ Card

10/100 PCI 1211-TX, and various other cheap adapters. It also supports

the Accton EN1207D which has a chip labeled MPX5030 (or MPX5038) which

appears to be a RealTek workalike.

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 transmis-

sion, 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.

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.

The rl driver supports the following media types:

autoselect Enable autoselection of the media type and options.

This is only supported if the PHY chip attached to

the RealTek controller supports NWAY autonegotia-

tion. The user can manually override the autose-

lected mode by adding media options to the

/etc/rc.conf file.

10baseT/UTP Set 10Mbps operation. The mediaopt option can also

be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex

modes.

100baseTX Set 100Mbps (fast ethernet) operation. The

mediaopt option can also be used to select either

full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

The rl driver supports the following media options:

full-duplex Force full duplex operation

half-duplex Force half duplex operation.

Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported by the

adapter. For more information on configuring this device, see

ifconfig(8).

DIAGNOSTICS

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

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

rl%d: watchdog timeout The device has stopped responding to the network,

or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).

rl%d: no memory for rx list The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for

the receiver ring.

rl%d: 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.

rl%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0 This message applies

only to adapters which support power management. Some operating systems

place the controller in low power mode when shutting down, and some PCI

BIOSes fail to bring the chip out of this state before configuring it.

The controller loses all of its PCI configuration in the D3 state, so if

the BIOS does not set it back to full power mode in time, it won't be

able to configure it correctly. The driver tries to detect this condi-

tion and bring the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state, but this

may not be enough to return the driver to a fully operational condition.

If you see this message at boot time and the driver fails to attach the

device as a network interface, you will have to perform second warm boot

to have the device properly configured.

Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another oper-

ating system. If you power down your system prior to booting FreeBSD,

the card should be configured correctly.

SEE ALSO

arp(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), ifconfig(8)

The RealTek 8129 and 8139 datasheets, ftp.realtek.com.tw:/lancard/data

sheet.

HISTORY

The rl device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.

AUTHORS

The rl driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>.

http://people.freebsd.org/~wpaul/RealTek/

BUGS

Since outbound packets must be longword aligned, the transmit routine has

to copy an unaligned packet into an mbuf cluster buffer before transmis-

sion. The driver abuses the fact that the cluster buffer pool is allo-

cated 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.

The RealTek data sheets are of especially poor quality: the grammar and

spelling are awful and there is a lot of information missing, particular-

ly 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 be-

fore the chip has had a chance to finish DMAing all of it.

The driver can check for an incomplete frame by inspecting the frame

length in the header preceeding 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 avail-

able packets. Neither this magic value nor its significance are docu-

mented anywhere in the RealTek data sheets.

FreeBSD November 4, 1998