VGE(4)

VGE(4) 💖

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for vge — the VIA Networking Technologies Velocity Gigabit Ethernet adapter driver. it lives in the Kernel Interfaces Manual section of the FreeBSD-adjacent universe and honestly? it's giving "solid little driver that just works". let's get into it 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

vge — the driver for VIA Networking Technologies Velocity Gigabit Ethernet adapters. that's the whole vibe. 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

so like, you got two ways to get this driver living in your life, and it depends on the ~vibe~ you're going for.

Option A: bake it into the kernel. put these lines in your kernel configuration file:

device miibus
device vge

Option B: load it as a module at boot time. drop this single line into loader.conf(5):

if_vge_load="YES"

and that's it. slay. ✨

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so the vge driver is out here providing support for a whole bunch of NICs and embedded Ethernet interfaces, and they're all based on the VIA Technologies VT6120, VT6122, VT6130 and VT6132 Velocity Family Gigabit Ethernet controller chips. iconic family tbh. 👑

let's talk about the chips themselves, because the tea is genuinely interesting:

the VT6120/VT6122 is a 33/66MHz 64-bit PCI device, and it's combining a tri-speed MAC with an integrated 10/100/1000 copper PHY. (heads up: some older cards use an external PHY instead, no shade.) the VT6130/VT6132 is the PCI express version of the Velocity family — glow up fr fr. 💅

and the MAC itself? she's doing THE MOST:

• TCP/IP hardware checksums (IPv4 only bestie, don't get it twisted)
• TCP large send
• VLAN tag insertion and stripping
• VLAN filtering
• a 64-entry CAM filter and a 64-entry VLAN filter
• 64-bit multicast hash filter
• 4 separate transmit DMA queues
• flow control
• jumbo frames (not on VT6130/VT6132, more on that drama below) up to 16K in size

and the Velocity family controllers have a 16K receive FIFO and a 48K transmit FIFO. buffered. hydrated. not dehydrated. 🍓

so what does the driver actually use out of all that? the vge driver takes advantage of the controller's checksum offload and VLAN tagging features, plus the jumbo frame support (except on VT6130/VT6132, again, we'll get there) and the CAM filter support. the CAM filter is what does the multicast address filtering, giving you 64 perfect multicast address filter support. and if your interface needs to join more than 64 multicast groups, the driver just switches over to using the hash filter. adaptive queen. 🧚

jumbo frames time. you enable them by setting the interface MTU to anything bigger than the default of 1500 bytes, up to a max of 9000 bytes. BUT — and this is the important part — jumbo frames are disabled on the VT6130/VT6132 controllers, because the TX MAC will literally hang when it tries to send a frame larger than 4K. not a vibe. not at all. 💀

receive and transmit checksum offload can be toggled on and off using the ifconfig(8) utility. you're in control, main character. 💅

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media types 🌈

the vge driver supports these media types:

• autoselect — enable autoselection of the media type and options. you can manually override the autoselected mode by adding media options to rc.conf(5). she picks for you but you can still be a little bossy about it.
• 10baseT/UTP — set 10Mbps operation. the ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.
• 100baseTX — set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation. the ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.
• 1000baseTX — set 1000baseTX operation over twisted pair. the ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

media options 🌸

and these media options too:

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

for more info on configuring this device, go check ifconfig(8). it's the plug. 🫶

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✨ HARDWARE ✨

the vge driver supports VIA Networking VT6120, VT6122, VT6130 and VT6132 based Gigabit Ethernet adapters, including these baddies:

• VIA Networking LAN-on-motherboard Gigabit Ethernet
• ZyXEL GN650-T 64-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (ZX1701)
• ZyXEL GN670-T 32-bit PCI Gigabit Ethernet NIC (ZX1702)

periodt. 💖

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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.vge.msi_disable — this tunable disables MSI support on the Ethernet hardware. the default value is 0.

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✨ SYSCTL VARIABLES ✨

these following variables are available as both sysctl(8) variables and loader(8) tunables. double threat energy, we love to see it. 🔥

• dev.vge.%d.int_holdoff — maximum number of time to delay interrupts. the valid range is 0 to 5100 in units of 1us, and the default is 150 (150us). the resolution of the timer is about 20us, so finer tuning than 20us wouldn't be available — don't try to be more precise than the clock, bestie, it's not gonna work. also: the interface should be brought down and up again before a change takes effect. (ngl that's the "did you try turning it off and on again" of it all 😭)
• dev.vge.%d.rx_coal_pkt — maximum number of packets to fire Rx completion interrupt. the valid range is 1 to 255, and the default is 64.
• dev.vge.%d.tx_coal_pkt — maximum number of packets to fire Tx completion interrupt. the valid range is 1 to 255, and the default is 128.

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✨ DIAGNOSTICS ✨

okay so sometimes things go wrong and the kernel will tell you about it. here's the translation of the screaming: 🙈

• vge%d: couldn't map memory — a fatal initialization error has occurred. yeah. it's over. 💀
• vge%d: couldn't map ports — a fatal initialization error has occurred.
• vge%d: couldn't map interrupt — a fatal initialization error has occurred.
• vge%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. check your slot, bestie, she needs the right seat. 💅
• vge%d: watchdog timeout — the device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable). could be the card, could literally just be the cable. check the cable first, i'm begging you. 😭

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

go read these next, they're the supporting cast and they ate:

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

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✨ HISTORY ✨

the vge device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.3. vintage but still serving. 🎀

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✨ AUTHORS ✨

the vge driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@windriver.com>. thank you Bill, absolute legend, we stan. 👑

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so yeah, that's the whole page bestie. go forth, configure your NIC, and remember: it's the vge driver, from the Kernel Interfaces Manual, sourced from Debian, dated May 29, 2011. mwah, love you, bye 💖✨🦋