TI(4)

NAME
ti - Alteon Networks Tigon I and II Gigabit Ethernet device

SYNOPSIS
ti* at pci?
ti* at sbus?

DESCRIPTION
The ti driver provides support for Gigabit Ethernet adapters based on the Alteon Networks Tigon Gigabit Ethernet controller chip, including the following:

•   3Com 3C985-SX Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseSX)
•   3Com 3C985B-SX Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseSX)
•   Alteon AceNIC V Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseSX)
•   Alteon AceNIC V Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseT)
•   Digital EtherWORKS 1000SX PCI Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseSX)
•   Farallon PN9000SX Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseSX)
•   Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseSX)
•   Netgear GA620T Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseT)
•   Silicon Graphics Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseSX)
•   Silicon Graphics Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseT)
•   Sun Vector Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseSX)

The Tigon contains an embedded R4000 CPU, Gigabit MAC, dual DMA channels and a PCI interface unit. The Tigon II contains two R4000 CPUs and other refinements. Either chip can be used in either a 32-bit or 64-bit PCI slot. Communication with the chip is achieved via PCI shared memory and bus master DMA. SBus cards are also available and use a special bridge chip. The Tigon I and II support hardware multicast address filtering, VLAN tag insertion and stripping, and Jumbo frame sizes up to 9000 bytes.

While the Tigon chipset supports 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds, support for 10 and 100Mbps speeds is only available on boards with the proper transceivers. Most adapters are only designed to work at 1000Mbps, however the driver should support those NICs that work at lower speeds as well.

Support for Jumbo frames is provided via the interface MTU setting. Selecting an MTU larger than 1500 bytes with the ifconfig(8) utility configures the adapter to receive and transmit Jumbo frames. Using Jumbo frames can greatly improve performance for certain tasks, such as file transfers and data streaming.

The ti driver supports the following media types:

autoselect
    Enable autoselection of the media type and options. The user can manually override the autoselected mode by adding media options to the appropriate hostname.if(5) file.

10baseT
    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.

1000baseSX
    Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) on fiber operation. Only full-duplex mode is supported at this speed.

1000baseT
    Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) on copper operation.

The ti driver supports the following media options:

full-duplex
    Force full duplex operation

half-duplex
    Force half duplex operation

For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

FILES
Two firmware files are necessary, for Tigon 1 and Tigon 2 devices. These are loaded on demand when the device is attached:

/etc/firmware/tigon1
/etc/firmware/tigon2

DIAGNOSTICS

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

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

ti%d: no memory for softc struct! The driver failed to allocate memory for per-device instance information during initialization.

ti%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.

ti%d: no memory for jumbo buffers! The driver failed to allocate memory for Jumbo frames during initialization.

ti%d: bios thinks we're in a 64 bit slot, but we aren't The BIOS has programmed the NIC as though it had been installed in a 64-bit PCI slot, but in fact the NIC is in a 32-bit slot. This happens as a result of a bug in some BIOSes. This can be worked around on the Tigon II, but on the Tigon I initialization will fail.

ti%d: board self-diagnostics failed! The ROMFAIL bit in the CPU state register was set after system startup, indicating that the on-board NIC diagnostics failed.

ti%d: unknown hwrev The driver detected a board with an unsupported hardware revision. The ti driver supports revision 4 (Tigon 1) and revision 6 (Tigon 2) chips and has firmware only for those devices.

ti%d: watchdog timeout -- resetting The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).

SEE ALSO
arp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pci(4), sbus(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY
The ti device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0. OpenBSD support first appeared in OpenBSD 2.6. SBus support was added in OpenBSD 4.7.

AUTHORS
-nosplit The ti driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@bsdi.com>. SBus support was added by Mark Kettenis <kettenis@openbsd.org>.