ALE(4)

🦋 ale(4) — the Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit/Fast Ethernet driver, bestie edition

Okay so welcome to the ale manual page, bestie 💖 this is the Kernel Interfaces Manual moment and honestly it's giving networking main character energy. Sit down, grab a snack 🍓, and let's get into it.

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✨ NAME ✨

ale — the Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 Gigabit/Fast Ethernet driver. That's it, that's the whole name. Iconic, brief, slay 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

So like, you want this driver baked into your kernel? 🧚 Then you gotta drop these lines into your kernel configuration file:

device miibus
device ale

Or, alternatively — and this is the lowkey easier path — load it as a module at boot time and put this line in loader.conf(5):

if_ale_load="YES"

No cap, that's all it takes 🫶

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

The ale device driver provides support for Atheros AR8121 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers and Atheros AR8113/AR8114 PCI Express Fast Ethernet controllers. It's gonna get your network up, periodt 🔥

Every single LOM that the ale driver supports comes with:

• TCP/UDP/IP checksum offload for both receive and transmit
• TCP segmentation offload (TSO)
• hardware VLAN tag stripping/insertion features
• Wake On Lan (WOL)
• an interrupt coalescing/moderation mechanism
• a 64-bit multicast hash filter

The AR8121 also supports Jumbo Frames (up to 8132 bytes), which you configure via the interface MTU setting. If you pick an MTU larger than 1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility, you're telling the adapter to receive and transmit Jumbo Frames. Big packets, big vibes ✨

🎀 media types the ale driver supports

• 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). Let it cook, or step in yourself 💅
• 10baseT/UTP — Set 10Mbps operation. Baby speeds, still valid 🦋
• 100baseTX — Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.
• 1000baseTX — Set 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair.

🎀 media options the ale driver supports

• full-duplex — Force full duplex operation. Talking AND listening at the same time, we love a two-way conversation 🫶
• half-duplex — Force half duplex operation.

For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

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✨ HARDWARE ✨

The ale device driver provides support for these Ethernet controllers:

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

Three controllers, all accounted for, no crumbs left behind 👑

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✨ LOADER TUNABLES ✨

Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf(5). Choose your own adventure, bestie 🌸

• hw.ale.msi_disable — This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware. The default value is 0.
• hw.ale.msix_disable — This tunable disables MSI-X support on the Ethernet hardware. The default value is 0.

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✨ SYSCTL VARIABLES ✨

The following variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and loader(8) tunables. Double duty, highkey obsessed 💜

• 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.
• dev.ale.%d.process_limit — Maximum amount of Rx frames to be processed in the event loop before rescheduling a taskqueue. The accepted range is 32 to 255, the default value is 128 events. The interface does not need to be brought down and up again before a change takes effect. Convenient or what 😌

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

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

Go read them, they're all in their own lane and they all ate 🍓

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✨ HISTORY ✨

The ale driver was written by Pyun YongHyeon <yongari@FreeBSD.org>. It first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1. A legend, fr fr 👑

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Okay that's the whole page, bestie, you're officially educated 💖

Cute little sign-off: this beauty comes from the Debian camp, dated November 12, 2008, and yes it's still rocking the ALE(4) name tag 🎀✨