FreeBSD-5.3/share/man/man4/man4.i386/vx.4

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.\" $FreeBSD: src/share/man/man4/man4.i386/vx.4,v 1.18.2.1 2004/08/30 23:20:28 brueffer Exp $
.\"
.Dd August 24, 2004
.Dt VX 4 i386
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm vx
.Nd 3Com EtherLink III / Fast EtherLink III (3c59x) Ethernet driver
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Cd "device vx"
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
driver provides support for the 3Com
.Dq Vortex
chipset.
.Pp
The medium selection
can be influenced by the following link flags to the
.Xr ifconfig 8
command:
.Pp
.Bl -tag -width LINK0X -compact
.It Em link0
Use the AUI port.
.It Em link1
Use the BNC port.
.It Em link2
Use the UTP port.
.El
.Sh HARDWARE
The
.Nm
driver supports the following cards:
.Pp
.Bl -bullet -compact
.It
3Com 3c590 EtherLink III PCI
.It
3Com 3c592 EtherLink III EISA
.It
3Com 3c595 Fast EtherLink III PCI in 10 Mbps mode
.It
3Com 3c597 Fast EtherLink III EISA in 10 Mbps mode
.El
.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
.Bl -diag
.It "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.
.El
.Pp
All other diagnostics indicate either a hardware problem or a bug in the
driver.
.Sh 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.
.Pp
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.
.Sh BUGS
The
.Nm
driver is known not to reset the adapter correctly following a warm boot
on some systems.
.Pp
The
.Nm
driver has not been exhaustively tested with all the models of cards that it
claims to support.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr arp 4 ,
.Xr netintro 4 ,
.Xr ng_ether 4 ,
.Xr ifconfig 8
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm
device driver first appeared in
.Fx 2.1 .
It was derived from the
.Nm ep
driver, from which it inherits most of its limitations.
.Sh AUTHORS
.An -nosplit
The
.Nm
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.