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_PRIVATE_JUMBOS
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 normally uses jumbo receive buffers allocated by the sendfile(2) buffer allocator, but can be configured to use its own private pool of jumbo buffers that are contiguous instead of buffers from the jumbo allocator, which are made up of multiple page sized chunks. To turn on private jumbos, use the TI_PRIVATE_JUMBOS 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 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

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 on 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), 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
-nosplit 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>.