vx (4)

Leading comments

Copyright (c) 1996, Fred Gray
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
   documentation and/or other m...

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man4/vx.4freebsd".)

NAME

vx - 3Com EtherLink III / Fast EtherLink III (3c59x) Ethernet driver

SYNOPSIS

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

device vx

Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf5:

if_vx_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The ifconfig driver provides support for the 3Com ``Vortex'' chipset.

The medium selection can be influenced by the following link flags to the ifconfig(8) command:

link0

Use the AUI port.

link1

Use the BNC port.

link2

Use the UTP port.

HARDWARE

The ifconfig driver supports the following cards:

• 3Com 3c590 EtherLink III PCI
• 3Com 3c592 EtherLink III EISA
• 3Com 3c595 Fast EtherLink III PCI in 10 Mbps mode
• 3Com 3c597 Fast EtherLink III EISA in 10 Mbps mode

DIAGNOSTICS

"vx%d: not configured; kernel is built for only %d devices."

There are not enough devices in the kernel configuration file for the number of adapters present in the system. Add devices to the configuration file, rebuild the kernel, and reboot.

All other diagnostics indicate either a hardware problem or a bug in the driver.

SEE ALSO

arp(4), netintro(4), ng_ether4, ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

The ifconfig device driver first appeared in Fx 2.1 . It was derived from the ep driver, from which it inherits most of its limitations.

AUTHORS

An -nosplit The ifconfig device driver and this manual page were written by An Fred Gray Aq fgray@rice.edu , based on the work of An Herb Peyerl and with the assistance of numerous others.

CAVEATS

Some early-revision 3c590 cards are defective and suffer from many receive overruns, which cause lost packets. The author has attempted to implement a test for it based on the information supplied by 3Com, but the test resulted mostly in spurious warnings.

The performance of this driver is somewhat limited by the fact that it uses only polled-mode I/O and does not make use of the bus-mastering capability of the cards.

BUGS

The ifconfig driver is known not to reset the adapter correctly following a warm boot on some systems.

The ifconfig driver has not been exhaustively tested with all the models of cards that it claims to support.