TI(4) FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual TI(4)
NAME
ti - Alteon Networks Tigon I and Tigon II Gigabit Ethernet driver
SYNOPSIS
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):
if_ti_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
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).
HARDWARE
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
LOADER TUNABLES
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.
SYSCTL VARIABLES
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).
IOCTLS
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.
FILES
/dev/ti[0-255] Tigon driver character interface.
DIAGNOSTICS
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).
SEE ALSO
sendfile(2), altq(4), arp(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4),
ifconfig(8), zero_copy(9)
HISTORY
The ti device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0.
AUTHORS
The ti driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@bsdi.com>. The header
splitting firmware modifications, character ioctl(2) interface and
debugging support were written by Kenneth Merry <ken@FreeBSD.org>.
Initial zero copy support was written by Andrew Gallatin
<gallatin@FreeBSD.org>.
FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6 November 14, 2011 FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6
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