NAME

       ae — Attansic/Atheros L2 FastEthernet controller driver

SYNOPSIS

       To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:

             device miibus
             device ae

       Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):

             if_ae_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

       The ae device driver provides support for Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers.

       The  controller supports hardware Ethernet checksum processing, hardware VLAN tag stripping/insertion and
       an interrupt moderation mechanism.  Attansic L2 also features a 64-bit multicast hash filter.

       The ae 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 rc.conf(5).

       10baseT/UTP  Select 10Mbps operation.

       100baseTX    Set 100Mbps (FastEthernet) operation.

       The ae driver provides support for 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  ae  driver  supports  Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers, and is known to support the
       following hardware:

       •   ASUS EeePC 701
       •   ASUS EeePC 900

       Other hardware may or may not work with this driver.

LOADER TUNABLES

       Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf(5).

       hw.ae.msi_disable
               This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware.  The default value is 0.

SYSCTL VARIABLES

       The ae driver collects a number of useful MAC counter during the work.  The statistics is  available  via
       the dev.ae.%d.stats sysctl(8) tree, where %d corresponds to the controller number.

DIAGNOSTICS

       ae%d: watchdog timeout.  The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the
       network connection (cable).

       ae%d: reset timeout.  The card reset operation has been timed out.

       ae%d:  Generating  random  ethernet address.  No valid Ethernet address was found in the controller NVRAM
       and registers.  Random locally administered address with ASUS OUI identifier will be used instead.

SEE ALSO

       altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

       The ae driver and this manual page was written by Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org>.  It first  appeared
       in FreeBSD 7.1.

BUGS

       The  Attansic  L2  FastEthernet  controller  supports  DMA  but  does not use a descriptor based transfer
       mechanism via scatter-gather DMA.  Thus the data should be copied to/from the controller memory  on  each
       transmit/receive.   Furthermore,  a  lot of data alignment restrictions apply.  This may introduce a high
       CPU load on systems with heavy network activity.  Luckily enough this should not be a problem  on  modern
       hardware as L2 does not support speeds faster than 100Mbps.

Debian                                            May 17, 2019                                             AE(4)