RL(4)                     OpenBSD Programmer's Manual                    RL(4)

NAME
     rl - RealTek 8129/8139 Fast Ethernet driver

SYNOPSIS
     rl* at pci? dev ? function ?

DESCRIPTION
     The rl driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded
     controllers based on the RealTek 8129 and 8139 Fast Ethernet controller
     chips. This includes the Allied Telesyn AT2550, Genius GF100TXR, NDC Com-
     munications NE100TX-E, OvisLink LEF-8129TX, OvisLink LEF-8139TX, Netronix
     Inc. EA-1210 NetEther 10/100, KTX-9130TX 10/100 Fast Ethernet, Encore
     ENL832-TX 10/100 M PCI, Longshine LCS-8038TX-R, the SMC EZ Card 10/100
     PCI 1211-TX, and various other cheap adapters.

     The RealTek controllers use bus master DMA but do not use a descriptor-
     based data transfer mechanism. The receiver uses a single fixed size ring
     buffer from which packets must be copied into mbufs. For transmission,
     there are only four outbound packet address registers which require all
     outgoing packets to be stored as contiguous buffers. Furthermore, out-
     bound packet buffers must be longword aligned or else transmission will
     fail.

     The 8129 differs from the 8139 in that the 8139 has an internal PHY which
     is controlled through special direct access registers whereas the 8129
     uses an external PHY via an MII bus. The 8139 supports both 10 and
     100Mbps speeds in either full or half duplex.  The 8129 can support the
     same speeds and modes given an appropriate PHY chip.

     The rl driver supports the following media types:

     autoselect            Enable autoselection of the media type and options.
                           This is only supported if the PHY chip attached to
                           the RealTek controller supports NWAY autonegotia-
                           tion. The user can manually override the autose-
                           lected mode by adding media options to the appro-
                           priate /etc/hostname.rlX file.

     10baseT/UTP           Set 10Mbps operation. The mediaopt option can also
                           be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex
                           modes.

     100baseTX             Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation. The mediaopt
                           option can also be used to select either full-
                           duplex or half-duplex modes.

     The rl driver supports the following media options:

     full-duplex           Force full duplex operation

     half-duplex           Force half duplex operation.

     Note that the 100baseTX media type is only available if supported by the
     adapter.  For more information on configuring this device, see
     ifconfig(8).

DIAGNOSTICS
     rl%d: couldn't map memory  A fatal initialization error has occurred.

     rl%d: couldn't map interrupt  A fatal initialization error has occurred.

     rl%d: watchdog timeout  The device has stopped responding to the network,

     or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).

     rl%d: no memory for rx list  The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for
     the receiver ring.

     rl%d: no memory for tx list  The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for
     the transmitter ring when allocating a pad buffer or collapsing an mbuf
     chain into a cluster.

     rl%d: chip is in D3 power state -- setting to D0  This message applies
     only to adapters which support power management. Some operating systems
     place the controller in low power mode when shutting down, and some PCI
     BIOSes fail to bring the chip out of this state before configuring it.
     The controller loses all of its PCI configuration in the D3 state, so if
     the BIOS does not set it back to full power mode in time, it won't be
     able to configure it correctly. The driver tries to detect this condition
     and bring the adapter back to the D0 (full power) state, but this may not
     be enough to return the driver to a fully operational condition. If you
     see this message at boot time and the driver fails to attach the device
     as a network interface, you will have to perform second warm boot to have
     the device properly configured.

     Note that this condition only occurs when warm booting from another oper-
     ating system. If you power down your system prior to booting OpenBSD, the
     card should be configured correctly.

SEE ALSO
     arp(4), netintro(4), ifconfig(8)

     The RealTek 8129 and 8139 datasheets, ftp.realtek.com.tw:/lancard/data
     sheet.

HISTORY
     The rl device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0. OpenBSD support first
     appeared in OpenBSD 2.5.

AUTHORS
     The rl driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>.

BUGS
     Since outbound packets must be longword aligned, the transmit routine has
     to copy an unaligned packet into an mbuf cluster buffer before transmis-
     sion. The driver abuses the fact that the cluster buffer pool is allocat-
     ed at system startup time in a contiguous region starting at a page
     boundary. Since cluster buffers are 2048 bytes, they are longword aligned
     by definition. The driver probably should not be depending on this char-
     acteristic.

     The RealTek data sheets are of especially poor quality: the grammar and
     spelling are awful and there is a lot of information missing, particular-
     ly concerning the receiver operation. One particularly important fact
     that the data sheets fail to mention relates to the way in which the chip
     fills in the receive buffer. When an interrupt is posted to signal that a
     frame has been received, it is possible that another frame might be in
     the process of being copied into the receive buffer while the driver is
     busy handling the first one. If the driver manages to finish processing
     the first frame before the chip is done DMAing the rest of the next
     frame, the driver may attempt to process the next frame in the buffer be-
     fore the chip has had a chance to finish DMAing all of it.

     The driver can check for an incomplete frame by inspecting the frame
     length in the header preceding the actual packet data: an incomplete
     frame will have the magic length of 0xFFF0. When the driver encounters
     this value, it knows that it has finished processing all currently avail-
     able packets. Neither this magic value nor its significance are document-
     ed anywhere in the RealTek data sheets.

OpenBSD 2.9                    November 4, 1998                              2
