Overview

The rtl100m driver provides support for PCI Ethernet adapters and embedded controllers based on the RealTek 8129 and 8139 Fast Ethernet controller chips.

The RealTek 8129/8139 series 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, outbound 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 rtl100m driver supports the following media types:

The rtl100m 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 Common Network Driver Options or ifconfig.

Hardware

Adapters supported by the rtl100m driver include:

• Accton 'Cheetah' EN1207D (MPX 5030/5038; RealTek 8139 clone)
• Allied Telesyn AT2550
  Allied Telesyn AT2500TX
• Belkin F5D5000
• BUFFALO (Melco INC.) LPC-CB-CLX (CardBus)
• Compaq HNE-300
• CompUSA no-name 10/100 PCI Ethernet NIC
• Corega FEther CB-TXD
  Corega FEtherII CB-TXD
• D-Link DFE-528TX
  D-Link DFE-530TX+
  D-Link DFE-538TX
  D-Link DFE-690TXD
• Edimax EP-4103DL CardBus
• Encore ENL832-TX 10/100 M PCI
• Farallon NetLINE 10/100 PCI
• Genius GF100TXR
• GigaFast Ethernet EE100-AXP
• KTX-9130TX 10/100 Fast Ethernet
• LevelOne FPC-0106TX
• Longshine LCS-8038TX-R
• NDC Communications NE100TX-E
• Netronix Inc. EA-1210 NetEther 10/100
• Nortel Networks 10/100BaseTX
• OvisLink LEF-8129TX
  OvisLink LEF-8139TX
• Peppercon AG ROL-F
• Planex FNW-3603-TX
  Planex FNW-3800-TX
• SMC EZ Card 10/100 PCI 1211-TX
• SOHO (PRAGMATIC) UE-1211C

Diagnostics

Diagnostic messages will be logged to System Evenrt Log.

• rtl100m%d: couldn't map memory couldn't map memory
  A fatal initialization error has occurred.
• rtl100m%d: couldn't map interrupt
  A fatal initialization error has occurred.
• rtl100m%d: watchdog timeout
  The device has stopped responding to the network, or there is a problem with the network connection (cable).
• rtl100m%d: no memory for rx list
  The driver failed to allocate an mbuf for the receiver ring.
• rtl100m%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.
• rtl100m%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 will not 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.

Authors

The driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>. INtime refers to this device as rtl100m.

Requirements