ALE(4)

NAME
ale - Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit/Fast Ethernet driver

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

device miibus
device ale

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

    if_ale_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION
The ale device driver provides support for Atheros AR8121 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers and Atheros AR8113/AR8114 PCI Express Fast Ethernet controllers.

All LOMs supported by the ale driver have TCP/UDP/IP checksum offload for both receive and transmit, hardware VLAN tag stripping/insertion features and an interrupt coalescing/moderation mechanism as well as a 64-bit multicast hash filter.

The AR8121 also supports Jumbo Frames (up to 8132 bytes), 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.

The ale 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.

100baseTX
    Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.

1000baseT
    Set 1000baseT operation over twisted pair.

The ale 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 ale device driver provides support for the following Ethernet controllers:

•   Atheros AR8113 PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
•   Atheros AR8114 PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
•   Atheros AR8121 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller

SYSCTL VARIABLES

dev.ale.%d.int_rx_mod
    Maximum amount of time to delay receive interrupt processing in units of 1us. The accepted range is 0 to 130000, the default is 30(30us). Value 0 completely disables the interrupt moderation.

dev.ale.%d.int_tx_mod
    Maximum amount of time to delay transmit interrupt processing in units of 1us. The accepted range is 0 to 130000, the default is 1000(1ms). Value 0 completely disables the interrupt moderation.

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

HISTORY
The ale driver was written by Pyun YongHyeon <yongari@FreeBSD.org>. It first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1.