VX(4)

💖 VX(4) — the 3Com EtherLink III glow-up 💖

okay so bestie, you're reading the i386 Kernel Interfaces Manual page for vx, and honestly? she's a legacy icon. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

vx — the 3Com EtherLink III / Fast EtherLink III (3c59x) Ethernet driver. yes that's her full government name 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

so if you wanna bake this driver into the kernel, you drop this line into your kernel config file:

device vx

or — if you'd rather load her as a module at boot time, no biggie, just put this into loader.conf(5):

if_vx_load="YES"

pick your fighter, both slay 💖

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🚨 DEPRECATION NOTICE 🚨

ok this is the important one so listen up fr fr: the vx driver is not present in FreeBSD 13.0 and later. she's gone, bestie. retired. living her best life elsewhere.

if you want the whole story, the receipts are at:

https://github.com/freebsd/fcp/blob/master/fcp-0101.md

no cap, go read it 😭

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

the vx driver provides support for the 3Com “Vortex” chipset. that's the whole vibe ✨

now — the medium selection can be influenced by these link flags you pass to the ifconfig(8) command:

• link0 — use the AUI port 👑
• link1 — use the BNC port 🦋
• link2 — use the UTP port 🌈

like little mood rings but for your network port, iykyk

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🔥 HARDWARE 🔥

the vx driver supports these cards, and only these cards:

• 3Com 3c590 EtherLink III PCI
• 3Com 3c595 Fast EtherLink III PCI in 10 Mbps mode

note that 10 Mbps mode on the 3c595 — she's fast, but not that fast 💀

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💀 DIAGNOSTICS 💀

all other diagnostics indicate either a hardware problem or a bug in the driver.

that's it. that's the section. no further elaboration, bestie, it's giving "figure it out" 😭

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

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

the whole friend group, go say hi 🫶

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🧚 HISTORY 🧚

the vx device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. she was derived from the ep driver, from which she inherits most of her limitations. generational trauma but make it networking, no cap 💅

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

the vx device driver and this manual page were written by Fred Gray <fgray@rice.edu>, based on the work of Herb Peyerl and with the assistance of numerous others.

shoutout to the whole squad, we love a collab 🌟

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🌈 CAVEATS 🌈

some early-revision 3c590 cards are defective and suffer from many receive overruns, which cause lost packets. the author attempted to implement a test for it based on the info supplied by 3Com, but the test resulted mostly in spurious warnings. so like… the test is there, it's just kind of a mess 🙈

also, the performance of this driver is somewhat limited by the fact that it uses only polled-mode I/O and does not make use of the bus-mastering capability of the cards. she's doing her best with what she's got, ok 😭

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💅 BUGS 💅

• the vx driver is known not to reset the adapter correctly following a warm boot on some systems. warm boot said "new me" and vx said "who are you" 💀
• the vx driver has not been exhaustively tested with all the models of cards that it claims to support. confidence without the testing, we love to see it fr fr 🙈

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and that's the page, bestie! this one came from Debian, dated October 24, 2018 — so like, old money, vintage, an heirloom piece honestly. treat her gently 🎀✨💖