AGE(4)

💖 AGE(4) 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're talking about the Attansic/Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet driver — yes that's the age driver, and no it's not about your birthday, it's about your network card slaying at gigabit speeds. this lives in the Kernel Interfaces Manual section of the FreeBSD-adjacent man pages, so pull up a chair 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

age — the Attansic/Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet driver. that's it, that's the whole vibe, it drives your ethernet card 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

so you wanna bake this driver straight into your kernel? iconic. drop these lines into your kernel config file:

device miibus
device age

or — if you're more of a "load it at boot as a module" girlie (valid!) — put this one line into loader.conf(5):

if_age_load="YES"

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

the age device driver is here to give you support for Attansic/Atheros L1 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers. periodt.

every single LOM that the age driver supports comes with TCP/UDP/IP checksum offload for both transmit and receive, TCP segmentation offload (aka TSO), hardware VLAN tag stripping/insertion features, an interrupt moderation mechanism, and a 64-bit multicast hash filter. it's giving loaded, and we're obsessed. 😭

the L1 also supports Jumbo Frames — up to 10240 bytes, bestie — and you configure that via the interface MTU setting. picking an MTU bigger than 1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility configures the adapter to receive and transmit Jumbo Frames. simple as.

the age driver supports these media types:

• autoselect — turns on autoselection of the media type and options. you can still 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.

and these media options:

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

want the full tea on configuring this device? go read ifconfig(8), iykyk 🎀

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👑 HARDWARE 👑

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

• 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

not me listing seventeen motherboards like it's a group chat roll call 💀

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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). your choice, main character.

• 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 🌈

these variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and loader(8) tunables, so you've got options:

• 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 (that's 100us). a value of 0 completely disables the interrupt moderation. ⚠️
• dev.age.%d.process_limit — maximum amount 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. good news bestie: the interface does not need to be brought down and up again before a change takes effect. 🙌
• dev.age.%d.stats — displays lots of useful MAC counters maintained in the driver. numbers go brrr ✨

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

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

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💜 HISTORY 💜

the age driver was written by Pyun YongHyeon <yongari@FreeBSD.org>. it first appeared in FreeBSD 7.1. legend behavior, honestly 💅

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and that's the whole page bestie! this one's from the Debian build, dated September 18, 2008 — so yeah, vintage, but still serving 💖 bye ily, go configure your ethernet 🎀✨