vx4freebsd
3com etherlink iii / fast etherlink iii (3c59x) ethernet driver
Usage
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel configuration file:
device vx
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):
if_vx_load="YES"
Deprecation notice
The vx driver is not present in FreeBSD 13.0 and later. See https://github.com/freebsd/fcp/blob/master/fcp-0101.md for more information.
Overview
The vx driver provides support for the 3Com “Vortex” chipset.
The medium selection can be influenced by the following link flags to the ifconfig(8) command:
- link0
-
Use the AUI port.
- link1
-
Use the BNC port.
- link2
-
Use the UTP port.
Hardware
The vx driver supports the following cards:
-
3Com 3c590 EtherLink III PCI
-
3Com 3c595 Fast EtherLink III PCI in 10 Mbps mode
Diagnostics
All other diagnostics indicate either a hardware problem or a bug in the driver.
Caveats
Some early-revision 3c590 cards are defective and suffer from many receive overruns, which cause lost packets. The author has attempted to implement a test for it based on the information supplied by 3Com, but the test resulted mostly in spurious warnings.
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.
Releases
9 releases since Debian 5.0 (Lenny); the text changed 6 times.