LGE(4)

💖 LGE 💖 — the Level 1 LXT1001 NetCellerator PCI Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver, bestie

okay so welcome to lge(4), the Kernel Interfaces Manual page that's literally about a gigabit ethernet driver. yes it's a 4 (that means "device driver" in manpage-speak, iykyk). let's get into it 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

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

device miibus
device lge

or, if you're feeling modular (main character energy), just load it as a module at boot time by putting this line in loader.conf(5):

if_lge_load="YES"

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

the lge driver is here to support a whole bunch of NICs based on the Level 1 LXT1001 NetCellerator Gigabit Ethernet controller chip. periodt.

so the LXT1001? it supports fiber PHYs and also a GMII port that works with 10/100/1000 copper PHYs — but ngl, there are currently no NICs on the market that use this feature. 💀 it's giving "capable but unused."

the LXT1001 also does TCP/IP checksum offload for receive and VLAN-based filtering, plus a 64-bit multicast hash filter. and yes bestie, it supports jumbo frames, which you configure via the interface MTU setting. if you pick an MTU larger than 1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility, the adapter gets configured to receive and transmit jumbo frames. and using jumbo frames can greatly improve performance for certain tasks — think file transfers and data streaming. slay. 🔥

the lge driver supports these media types:

• autoselect — turns on autoselection of the media type and options. you can manually override the autoselected mode by adding media options to rc.conf(5). 💅
• 1000baseSX — sets 1000baseSX operation over fiber optic cable. both full-duplex and half-duplex modes are supported.

and the lge driver supports these media options:

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

for more info on configuring this device, go look at ifconfig(8). 🫶

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🎀 HARDWARE 🎀

adapters supported by the lge driver include:

• SMC TigerCard 1000 (SMC9462SX)
• D-Link DGE-500SX

that's the whole list, no cap. 👑

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💀 DIAGNOSTICS 💀

• lge%d: couldn't map memory — a fatal initialization error has occurred. 😭
• lge%d: couldn't map ports — a fatal initialization error has occurred. 😭
• lge%d: couldn't map interrupt — a fatal initialization error has occurred. 😭
• lge%d: no memory for softc struct! — the driver failed to allocate memory for per-device instance information during initialization.
• lge%d: failed to enable memory mapping! — the driver failed to initialize PCI shared memory mapping. this might happen if the card is not in a bus-master slot. 🙈
• lge%d: no memory for jumbo buffers! — the driver failed to allocate memory for jumbo frames during initialization.
• lge%d: watchdog timeout — the device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable). 🍓

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

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

Level 1 LXT1001 Programming Manual, https://www.FreeBSD.org/~wpaul/Level1/LXT1001SRM.pdf.

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⭐ HISTORY ⭐

the lge device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.4. a true elder icon fr fr.

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💜 AUTHORS 💜

the lge driver was written by Bill Paul <william.paul@windriver.com>. thank you king 🫡

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and that's the whole page bestie!! 💖 this one came from the Debian crew — dated July 16, 2005 — and yeah, LGE(4) is the name of the game. go configure some jumbo frames, you got this ✨🧚‍♀️