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DESCRIPTION

• 3Com 3c996-T (10/100/1000baseT)
• Dell PowerEdge 2550 integrated BCM5700 NIC (10/100/1000baseT)
• Netgear GA302T (10/100/1000baseT)
• SysKonnect SK-9D21 (10/100/1000baseT)
• SysKonnect SK-9D41 (1000baseSX)

All of these NICs are capable of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps speeds over CAT5 copper cable, except for the SysKonnect SK-9D41 which supports only 1000Mbps over multimode fiber. The BCM570x builds upon the technology of the Alteon Tigon II. It has two R4000 CPU cores and is PCI v2.2 and PCI-X v1.0 compliant. It supports IP, TCP and UDP checksum offload for both receive and transmit, multiple RX and TX DMA rings for QoS applications, rules-based receive filtering, and VLAN tag stripping/insertion as well as a 256-bit multicast hash filter. Additional features may be provided via value-add firmware updates. The BCM570x supports TBI (ten bit interface) and GMII transceivers, which means it can be used with either copper or 1000baseX fiber applications. Note however the device only supports a single speed in TBI mode.

Most cards also use the Broadcom BCM5401 or BCM5411 10/100/1000 copper gigabit transceivers, which support autonegotiation of 10, 100 and 1000mbps modes in full or half duplex.

The BCM5700 also supports jumbo frames, which can be configured 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 bge 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 rc.conf(5).

10baseT/UTP

Set 10Mbps operation. The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

100baseTX

Set 100Mbps (fast ethernet) operation. The ifconfig(8) mediaopt option can also be used to select either full-duplex or half-duplex modes.

1000baseT

Set 1000baseT operation over twisted pair. full-duplex and half-duplex modes are supported.

1000baseSX

Set 1000Mbps (gigabit ethernet) operation. Both full-duplex and half-duplex modes are supported.

The bge driver supports the following media options:

full-duplex

Force full duplex operation.

half-duplex

Force half duplex operation.

The bge driver also supports one special link option for 1000baseT cards:

link0

With 1000baseT cards, establishing a link between two ports requires that one port be configured as a master and the other a slave. With autonegotiation, the master/slave settings will be chosen automatically. However when manually selecting the link state, it is necessary to force one side of the link to be a master and the other a slave. The bge driver configures the ports as slaves by default. Setting the link0 flag with ifconfig(8) will set a port as a master instead.

For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8). The bge driver supports polling(4).