BGE(4)

NAME
bge - Broadcom BCM570x PCI gigabit ethernet adapter driver

SYNOPSIS
device miibus
device bge

DESCRIPTION
The bge driver provides support for various NICs based on the Broadcom BCM570x family of gigabit ethernet controller chips, including the following:

•   3Com 3c996-T (10/100/1000baseT)
•   Dell PowerEdge 2550 integrated BCM5700 NIC (10/100/1000baseT)
•   Netgear GA302T (10/100/1000baseT)
•   SysKonnect SK-9D21 (10/100/1000baseT)
•   SysKonnect SK-9D41 (1000baseSX)

All of these NICs are capable of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds over CAT5 copper cable, except for the SysKonnect SK-9D41 which supports only 1000Mbps over multimode fiber. The BCM570x builds upon the technology of the Alteon Tigon II. It has two R4000 CPU cores and is PCI v2.2 and PCI-X v1.0 compliant. It supports IP, TCP and UDP checksum offload for both receive and transmit, multiple RX and TX DMA rings for QoS applications, rules-based receive filtering, and VLAN tag stripping/insertion as well as a 256-bit multicast hash filter. Additional features may be provided via value-add firmware updates. The BCM570x supports TBI (ten bit interface) and GMII transceivers, which means it can be used with either copper or 1000baseX fiber applications. Note however the device only supports a single speed in TBI mode.

Most cards also use the Broadcom BCM5401 or BCM5411 10/100/1000 copper gigabit transceivers, which support autonegotiation of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps modes in full or half duplex.

The BCM5700 also supports jumbo frames, which can be configured 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.

The PCIe Ethernet adapters based on Broadcom BCM57785/BCM5718 families chips are supported by the bnx(4) driver.

The bge 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
    Set 10Mbps operation. The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

100baseTX
    Set 100Mbps (fast ethernet) operation. The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

1000baseT
    Set 1000baseT operation over twisted pair. full-duplex and half-duplex modes are supported.

1000baseSX
    Set 1000Mbps (gigabit ethernet) operation. Both full-duplex and half-duplex modes are supported.

The bge driver supports the following media options:

full-duplex
    Force full duplex operation.

half-duplex
    Force half duplex operation.

The bge driver also supports one special link option for 1000baseT cards:

link0
    With 1000baseT cards, establishing a link between two ports requires that one port be configured as a master and the other a slave. With autonegotiation, the master/slave settings will be chosen automatically. However when manually selecting the link state, it is necessary to force one side of the link to be a master and the other a slave. The bge driver configures the ports as slaves by default. Setting the link0 flag with ifconfig(8) will set a port as a master instead.

For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8). The bge driver supports polling(4).

LOADER TUNABLES

hw.bge.msi.enable
    By default, the driver will use MSI if it is supported. This behavior can be turned off by setting this tunable to 0.

hw.bge.fake_autoneg
    Set to 1 for some IBM blade servers, if auto-negotiation between the onboard bge and the switch module is broken. Disabled by default.

DIAGNOSTICS

bge%d: couldn't map memory A fatal initialization error has occurred.

bge%d: couldn't map ports A fatal initialization error has occurred.

bge%d: couldn't map interrupt A fatal initialization error has occurred.

bge%d: no memory for softc struct! The driver failed to allocate memory for per-device instance information during initialization.

bge%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.

bge%d: no memory for jumbo buffers! The driver failed to allocate memory for jumbo frames during initialization.

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

SEE ALSO
arp(4), bnx(4), ifmedia(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), polling(4), vlan(4), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY
The bge device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.5.

AUTHORS
The bge driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@windriver.com>.