184870 |
12-Nov-2008 |
yongari |
Add ale(4), a driver for Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCIe ethernet controller. The controller is also known as L1E(AR8121) and L2E(AR8113/AR8114). Unlike its predecessor Attansic L1, AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 uses completely different Rx logic such that it requires separate driver. Datasheet for AR81xx is not available to open source driver writers but it shares large part of Tx and PHY logic of L1. I still don't understand some part of register meaning and some MAC statistics counters but the driver seems to have no critical issues for performance and stability.
The AR81xx requires copy operation to pass received frames to upper stack such that ale(4) consumes a lot of CPU cycles than that of other controller. A couple of silicon bugs also adds more CPU cycles to address the known hardware bug. However, if you have fast CPU you can still saturate the link. Currently ale(4) supports the following hardware features. - MSI. - TCP Segmentation offload. - Hardware VLAN tag insertion/stripping with checksum offload. - Tx TCP/UDP checksum offload and Rx IP/TCP/UDP checksum offload. - Tx/Rx interrupt moderation. - Hardware statistics counters. - Jumbo frame. - WOL.
AR81xx PCIe ethernet controllers are mainly found on ASUS EeePC or P5Q series of ASUS motherboards. Special thanks to Jeremy Chadwick who sent the hardware to me. Without his donation writing a driver for AR81xx would never have been possible. Big thanks to all people who reported feedback or tested patches.
HW donated by: koitsu Tested by: bsam, Joao Barros <joao.barros <> gmail DOT com > Jan Henrik Sylvester <me <> janh DOT de > Ivan Brawley < ivan <> brawley DOT id DOT au >, CURRENT ML
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