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Date:      Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:34:12 +0900
From:      Pyun YongHyeon <pyunyh@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Call for testers : age(4), Attansic/Atheros L1 gigabit ethernet controller
Message-ID:  <20080310043412.GA4425@cdnetworks.co.kr>

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Hi,

Due to high pressure from FreeBSD user community to get a working
driver for Attansic/Atheros L1 giagabit ethernet I had changed
priorities in my TODO list. I had spent several weeks to write
this driver and I managed to get a working driver. From my very
limited testing the driver seems to work as expected.

ATM the performance is horrible so there must be mis-programmed
registers or incorrectly configured parameters. Due to the
existence several variants of L1 hardware and lack of publicly
available documentation I'd like to know how many variants are
supported by this driver. L1 gigabit ethernet controller is
frequently found in ASUS motherboard. Note, it seems that there are
other variants of hardware as known as L2(Fast ethernet) and newer
gigabit ethernet(AR81xx) from Atheros. These are not supported by
this driver and they require a seperate driver. The following
hardware features are supported by age(4).

  - TCP Segmentation Offload.
  - Hardware VLAN tag insertion/stripping.
  - TCP/UDP checksum offload.
  - Interrupt moderation.
  - Hardware statistics counter support.
  - Jumbo frame support.
  - WOL support.

As I said, I already know poor performance issue of age(4) but I'm
more interested in getting a stable driver. If you're owner of L1
gigabit ethernet controller please give it spin and let me know
how it goes on your system.

Install:
o Get age(4) jumbo diff at the following URL. The diff was
  generated against HEAD but I guess it would also apply to RELENG_7
  and 7.0-RELEASE.
  http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/age/age.HEAD.diff
o Patch kernel srouce and rebuild/reboot your kernel.
  #cd /usr/src
  #patch -p0 < /path/to/age.HEAD.diff 

Test:
Use age(4) for your normal network activities and report success or
any issues you've encountered. The driver may be chatty to ease of
debugging.

Thanks in advance.
-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon



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