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WB(4) Device Drivers Manual WB(4)

wb —
Winbond W89C840F 10/100 Ethernet device

wb* at pci?
amphy* at mii?

The wb driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded controllers based on the Winbond W89C840F Fast Ethernet controller chip. This includes the TRENDnet TE100-PCIE and various other cheap boards. The 840F should not be confused with the 940F, which is an NE2000 clone and only supports 10Mbps speeds.

The Winbond controller uses bus master DMA and is designed to be a DEC "tulip" work-alike. It differs from the standard DEC design in several ways: the control and status registers are spaced 4 bytes apart instead of 8, and the receive filter is programmed through registers rather than by downloading a special setup frame via the transmit DMA engine. Using an external PHY, the Winbond chip supports both 10 and 100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.

The wb 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 Winbond controller supports NWAY autonegotiation. The user can manually override the autoselected mode by adding media 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 wb 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).

wb0: couldn't map memory
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
wb0: couldn't map interrupt
A fatal initialization error has occurred.
wb0: watchdog timeout
The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).
wb0: no memory for rx list
The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.
wb0: 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.

amphy(4), arp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pci(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)

The wb device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0. OpenBSD support first appeared in OpenBSD 2.5.

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

The Winbond chip seems to behave strangely in some cases when the link partner switches modes. If, for example, both sides are set to 10Mbps half-duplex, and the other end is changed to 100Mbps full-duplex, the Winbond's receiver suddenly starts writing trash all over the RX descriptors. The wb driver handles this by forcing a reset of both the controller chip and attached PHY. This is drastic, but it appears to be the only way to recover properly from this condition.
July 16, 2013 OpenBSD-current