AE(4)

📦 version 15.1, in freebsd 14.5, freebsd 15.1

💖 NAME 💖

ae — Attansic/Atheros L2 FastEthernet controller driver. Okay so bestie, this is the AE(4) manual page, and it's all about the ae driver. Slay. 💅

🛠️ SYNOPSIS 🛠️

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

device miibus
device ae

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

if_ae_load="YES"

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

The ae device driver provides support for Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers. The controller supports hardware Ethernet checksum processing, hardware VLAN tag stripping/insertion and an interrupt moderation mechanism. Attansic L2 also features a 64-bit multicast hash filter. Periodt.

The ae 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 — Select 10Mbps operation.
  • 100baseTX — Set 100Mbps (FastEthernet) operation.

The ae driver provides support for 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 ae driver supports Attansic/Atheros L2 PCIe FastEthernet controllers, and is known to support the following hardware:

  • ASUS EeePC 701
  • ASUS EeePC 900

Other hardware may or may not work with this driver. Lowkey a vibe check situation. 🦋

🎛️ LOADER TUNABLES 🎛️

Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf(5).

  • hw.ae.msi_disable — This tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware. The default value is 0.

📊 SYSCTL VARIABLES 📊

The ae driver collects a number of useful MAC counter during the work. The statistics is available via the dev.ae.%d.stats sysctl(8) tree, where %d corresponds to the controller number.

🚨 DIAGNOSTICS 🚨

  • ae%d: watchdog timeout. — The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).
  • ae%d: reset timeout. — The card reset operation has been timed out.
  • ae%d: Generating random ethernet address. — No valid Ethernet address was found in the controller NVRAM and registers. Random locally administered address with ASUS OUI identifier will be used instead.

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

📜 HISTORY 📜

The ae driver and this manual page was written by Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org>. It first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1. Iconic behavior. 👑

🐛 BUGS 🐛

Ngl, the Attansic L2 FastEthernet controller supports DMA but does not use a descriptor based transfer mechanism via scatter-gather DMA. Thus the data should be copied to/from the controller memory on each transmit/receive. Furthermore, a lot of data alignment restrictions apply. This may introduce a high CPU load on systems with heavy network activity. Luckily enough this should not be a problem on modern hardware as L2 does not support speeds faster than 100Mbps. It's giving "fine for this speed, bestie." 💀

Footer tea ☕: this page's source/version/date situation is Debian, May 17, 2019, AE(4) — mwah, bestie 💋✨

📦 where this page comes from