ti — Alteon
Networks Tigon I and Tigon II Gigabit Ethernet driver
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines
in your kernel configuration file:
device ti
options TI_SF_BUF_JUMBO
options TI_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place
the following line in loader.conf(5):
The ti driver provides support for PCI
Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on the Alteon Networks Tigon Gigabit
Ethernet controller chip. The Tigon contains an embedded R4000 CPU, gigabit
MAC, dual DMA channels and a PCI interface unit. The Tigon II contains two
R4000 CPUs and other refinements. Either chip can be used in either a 32-bit
or 64-bit PCI slot. Communication with the chip is achieved via PCI shared
memory and bus master DMA. The Tigon I and II support hardware multicast
address filtering, VLAN tag extraction and insertion, and jumbo Ethernet
frames sizes up to 9000 bytes. Note that the Tigon I chipset is no longer in
active production: all new adapters should come equipped with Tigon II
chipsets.
While the Tigon chipset supports 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds,
support for 10 and 100Mbps speeds is only available on boards with the
proper transceivers. Most adapters are only designed to work at 1000Mbps,
however the driver should support those NICs that work at lower speeds as
well.
Support for jumbo frames is provided 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.
Header splitting support for Tigon 2 boards (this option has no
effect for the Tigon 1) can be turned on with the
TI_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT option. See
zero_copy(9) for more discussion on zero copy receive and
header splitting.
The ti driver uses UMA backed jumbo
receive buffers, but can be configured to use sendfile(2)
buffer allocator. To turn on sendfile(2) buffer allocator,
use the TI_SF_BUF_JUMBO option.
Support for vlans is also available using the
vlan(4) mechanism. See the vlan(4) man
page for more details.
The ti 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 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.
- 1000baseSX
- Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) operation. Only
full-duplex mode is supported at this speed.
The ti 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).
The ti driver supports Gigabit Ethernet
adapters based on the Alteon Tigon I and II chips. The
ti driver has been tested with the following
adapters:
- 3Com 3c985-SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter (Tigon 1)
- 3Com 3c985B-SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter (Tigon 2)
- Alteon AceNIC V Gigabit Ethernet adapter (1000baseSX)
- Alteon AceNIC V Gigabit Ethernet adapter (1000baseT)
- Digital EtherWORKS 1000SX PCI Gigabit adapter
- Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter (1000baseSX)
- Netgear GA620T Gigabit Ethernet adapter (1000baseT)
The following adapters should also be supported but have not yet
been tested:
- Asante GigaNIX1000T Gigabit Ethernet adapter
- Asante PCI 1000BASE-SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter
- Farallon PN9000SX Gigabit Ethernet adapter
- NEC Gigabit Ethernet
- Silicon Graphics PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter
Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt
before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf(5).
- hw.ti.%d.dac
- If this tunable is set to 0 it will disable DAC (Dual Address Cycle). The
default value is 1 which means driver will use full 64bit DMA
addressing.
The following variables are available as both
sysctl(8) variables and loader(8)
tunables. The interface has to be brought down and up again before a change
takes effect when any of the following tunables are changed. The one
microsecond clock tick referenced below is a nominal time and the actual
hardware may not provide granularity to this level. For example, on Tigon 2
(revision 6) cards with release 12.0 the clock granularity is 5
microseconds.
- dev.ti.%d.rx_coal_ticks
- This value, receive coalesced ticks, controls the number of clock ticks
(of 1 microseconds each) that must elapse before the NIC DMAs the receive
return producer pointer to the Host and generates an interrupt. This
parameter works in conjunction with the rx_max_coal_bds, receive max
coalesced BDs, tunable parameter. The NIC will return the receive return
producer pointer to the Host when either of the thresholds is exceeded. A
value of 0 means that this parameter is ignored and receive BDs will only
be returned when the receive max coalesced BDs value is reached. The
default value is 170.
- dev.ti.%d.rx_max_coal_bds
- This value, receive max coalesced BDs, controls the number of receive
buffer descriptors that will be coalesced before the NIC updates the
receive return ring producer index. If this value is set to 0 it will
disable receive buffer descriptor coalescing. The default value is
64.
- dev.ti.%d.ti_tx_coal_ticks
- This value, send coalesced ticks, controls the number of clock ticks (of 1
microseconds each) that must elapse before the NIC DMAs the send consumer
pointer to the Host and generates an interrupt. This parameter works in
conjunction with the tx_max_coal_bds, send max coalesced BDs, tunable
parameter. The NIC will return the send consumer pointer to the Host when
either of the thresholds is exceeded. A value of 0 means that this
parameter is ignored and send BDs will only be returned when the send max
coalesced BDs value is reached. The default value is 2000.
- dev.ti.%d.tx_max_coal_bds
- This value, send max coalesced BDs, controls the number of send buffer
descriptors that will be coalesced before the NIC updates the send
consumer index. If this value is set to 0 it will disable send buffer
descriptor coalescing. The default value is 32.
- dev.ti.%d.tx_buf_ratio
- This value controls the ratio of the remaining memory in the NIC that
should be devoted to transmit buffer vs. receive buffer. The lower 7 bits
are used to indicate the ratio in 1/64th increments. For example, setting
this value to 16 will set the transmit buffer to 1/4 of the remaining
buffer space. In no cases will the transmit or receive buffer be reduced
below 68 KB. For a 1 MB NIC the approximate total space for data buffers
is 800 KB. For a 512 KB NIC that number is 300 KB. The default value is
21.
- dev.ti.%d.stat_ticks
- The value, stat ticks, controls the number of clock ticks (of 1
microseconds each) that must elapse before the NIC DMAs the statistics
block to the Host and generates a STATS_UPDATED event. If set to zero then
statistics are never DMAed to the Host. It is recommended that this value
be set to a high enough frequency to not mislead someone reading
statistics refreshes. Several times a second is enough. The default value
is 2000000 (2 seconds).
In addition to the standard socket(2)
ioctl(2) calls implemented by most network drivers, the
ti driver also includes a character device interface
that can be used for additional diagnostics, configuration and debugging.
With this character device interface, and a specially patched version of
gdb(1), the user can debug firmware running on the Tigon
board.
These ioctls and their arguments are defined in the
<sys/tiio.h> header
file.
TIIOCGETSTATS- Return card statistics DMAed from the card into kernel memory
approximately every 2 seconds. (That time interval can be changed via the
TIIOCSETPARAMS ioctl.) The argument is
struct ti_stats.
TIIOCGETPARAMS- Get various performance-related firmware parameters that largely affect
how interrupts are coalesced. The argument is struct
ti_params.
TIIOCSETPARAMS- Set various performance-related firmware parameters that largely affect
how interrupts are coalesced. The argument is struct
ti_params.
TIIOCSETTRACE- Tell the NIC to trace the requested types of information. The argument is
ti_trace_type.
TIIOCGETTRACE- Dump the trace buffer from the card. The argument is
struct ti_trace_buf.
ALT_ATTACH- This ioctl is used for compatibility with Alteon's Solaris driver. They
apparently only have one character interface for debugging, so they have
to tell it which Tigon instance they want to debug. This ioctl is a noop
for FreeBSD.
ALT_READ_TG_MEM- Read the requested memory region from the Tigon board. The argument is
struct tg_mem.
ALT_WRITE_TG_MEM- Write to the requested memory region on the Tigon board. The argument is
struct tg_mem.
ALT_READ_TG_REG- Read the requested register from the Tigon board. The argument is
struct tg_reg.
ALT_WRITE_TG_REG- Write to the requested register on the Tigon board. The argument is
struct tg_reg.
- /dev/ti[0-255]
- Tigon driver character interface.
- ti%d: couldn't map memory
- A fatal initialization error has occurred.
- ti%d: couldn't map interrupt
- A fatal initialization error has occurred.
- ti%d: no memory for softc struct!
- The driver failed to allocate memory for per-device instance information
during initialization.
- ti%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.
- ti%d: no memory for jumbo buffers!
- The driver failed to allocate memory for jumbo frames during
initialization.
- ti%d: bios thinks we're in a 64 bit slot, but we aren't
- The BIOS has programmed the NIC as though it had been installed in a
64-bit PCI slot, but in fact the NIC is in a 32-bit slot. This happens as
a result of a bug in some BIOSes. This can be worked around on the Tigon
II, but on the Tigon I initialization will fail.
- ti%d: board self-diagnostics failed!
- The ROMFAIL bit in the CPU state register was set after system startup,
indicating that the on-board NIC diagnostics failed.
- ti%d: unknown hwrev
- The driver detected a board with an unsupported hardware revision. The
ti driver supports revision 4 (Tigon 1) and
revision 6 (Tigon 2) chips and has firmware only for those devices.
- ti%d: watchdog timeout
- The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem
with the network connection (cable).
The ti device driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 3.0.