VR(4) OpenBSD Programmer's Manual VR(4)
NAME
vr - VIA Technologies VT3043, VT86C100A, VT6105/VT6105M 10/100 Ethernet
device
SYNOPSIS
vr* at pci?
amphy* at mii?
sqphy* at mii?
DESCRIPTION
The vr driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
controllers based on the VIA Technologies VT3043 Rhine I, VT86C100A Rhine
II, and VT6105/VT6105M Rhine III Fast Ethernet controller chips. This
includes the D-Link DFE530-TX and various other commodity Fast Ethernet
cards.
The VIA Rhine chips use bus master DMA and have a software interface de-
signed to resemble that of the DEC 21x4x "tulip" chips. The major dif-
ferences are that the receive filter in the Rhine chips is much simpler
and is programmed through registers rather than by downloading a special
setup frame through the transmit DMA engine, and that transmit and re-
ceive DMA buffers must be longword aligned. The Rhine chips are meant to
be interfaced with external physical layer devices via an MII bus. They
support both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.
The vr driver supports the following media types:
autoselect Enable autoselection of the media type and options. The us-
er can manually override the autoselected mode by adding me-
dia options to the appropriate hostname.if(5) file.
10baseT 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 vr 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
vr%d: couldn't map memory A fatal initialization error has occurred.
vr%d: couldn't map interrupt A fatal initialization error has occurred.
vr%d: watchdog timeout The device has stopped responding to the network,
or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).
vr%d: no memory for rx list The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for
the receiver ring.
vr%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.
vr%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 this message appears at boot time and the driver fails to attach the
device as a network interface, a second warm boot will have to be per-
formed to have the device properly configured.
Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another oper-
ating system. If the system is powered down prior to booting OpenBSD,
the card should be configured correctly.
SEE ALSO
amphy(4), arp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pci(4), sqphy(4),
hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)
The VIA Technologies VT86C100A data sheet, http://www.via.com.tw.
HISTORY
The vr device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0. OpenBSD support
first appeared in OpenBSD 2.5.
AUTHORS
The vr driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>.
BUGS
The vr driver always copies transmit mbuf chains into longword-aligned
buffers prior to transmission in order to pacify the Rhine chips. If
buffers are not aligned correctly, the chip will round the supplied
buffer address and begin DMAing from the wrong location. This buffer
copying impairs transmit performance on slower systems but can't be
avoided. On faster machines (e.g., a Pentium II), the performance impact
is much less noticeable.
OpenBSD 4.0 November 22, 1998 2