AGE(4)

💖 NAME 💖

okay so bestie, age is literally the Attansic/Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet driver — that's its whole government name 💅. This is age(4) from the Kernel Interfaces Manual, and we are about to get into it, no cap.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

so if you wanna compile this driver directly into the kernel, you gotta put these lines in your kernel configuration file, periodt:

device miibus
device age

or, alternative route, if you'd rather load the driver as a module at boot time, put this line in loader.conf(5):

if_age_load="YES"

slay either way 🫶

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

the age device driver provides support for Attansic/Atheros L1 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers — yes, PCI Express, we love a glow-up 💖.

all LOMs supported by the age driver have TCP/UDP/IP checksum offload for both transmit and receive, TCP segmentation offload (TSO), hardware VLAN tag stripping/insertion features, an interrupt moderation mechanism, and a 64-bit multicast hash filter. it's giving fully loaded, honestly 😭💅.

the L1 also supports Jumbo Frames (up to 10240 bytes), which you can configure 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. big frames, big energy ✨.

the age driver supports the following media types:

• autoselect — enables 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 — sets 10Mbps operation.
• 100baseTX — sets 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.
• 1000baseTX — sets 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair.

the age driver supports the following media options:

• full-duplex — forces full duplex operation.
• half-duplex — forces half duplex operation.

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

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🌸 HARDWARE 🌸

the age driver provides support for LOMs based on Attansic/Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet controller chips, including:

• ASUS M2N8-VMX
• ASUS M2V
• ASUS M3A
• ASUS P2-M2A590G
• ASUS P5B-E
• ASUS P5B-MX/WIFI-AP
• ASUS P5B-VMSE
• ASUS P5K
• ASUS P5KC
• ASUS P5KPL-C
• ASUS P5KPL-VM
• ASUS P5K-SE
• ASUS P5K-V
• ASUS P5L-MX
• ASUS P5DL2-VM
• ASUS P5L-VM 1394
• ASUS G2S

like, that's the whole roster bestie. iconic lineup tbh 👑.

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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) — pick your fighter 💅.

• hw.age.msi_disable — this tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware. the default value is 0.
• hw.age.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 — dual threat, we love to see it ✨:

• dev.age.%d.int_mod — maximum amount of time to delay interrupt processing, in units of 2us. the accepted range is 0 to 65000, the default is 50 (100us). value 0 completely disables the interrupt moderation.

lowkey if you set it to 0 you're turning interrupt moderation all the way off — just so you know 👀💀.

• dev.age.%d.process_limit — maximum number of Rx events to be processed in the event loop before rescheduling a taskqueue. the accepted range is 30 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, honestly 🫶.
• dev.age.%d.stats — displays lots of useful MAC counters maintained in the driver. stats girlies rise 🌈.

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

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

go read those too, bestie, iykyk 💜.

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👑 HISTORY 👑

the age driver was written by Pyun YongHyeon <yongari@FreeBSD.org>. it first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1. a legend, fr fr ⭐.

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀💖 this little beauty comes from the Debian build, dated September 18, 2008, and the page version is literally AGE(4) — okay bye, slay, happy networking 💅✨🦋