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if_sk_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The SysKonnect based adapters consist of two main components: the XaQti Corp. XMAC II gigabit MAC and the SysKonnect GEnesis controller ASIC. The XMAC provides the gigabit MAC and PHY support while the GEnesis provides an interface to the PCI bus, DMA support, packet buffering and arbitration. The GEnesis can control up to two XMACs simultaneously, allowing dual-port NIC configurations.

The Marvell based adapters are a single integrated circuit, but are still presented as a separate MAC and controller ASIC.

The sk driver configures dual port SysKonnect adapters such that each XMAC is treated as a separate logical network interface. Both ports can operate independently of each other and can be connected to separate networks. The SysKonnect driver software currently only uses the second port on dual port adapters for failover purposes: if the link on the primary port fails, the SysKonnect driver will automatically switch traffic onto the second port.

The XaQti XMAC II supports full and half duplex operation with autonegotiation. The XMAC also supports unlimited frame sizes. Support for jumbo frames is provided 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 sk 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 the /etc/rc.conf file.

1000baseT

Set 1000baseT operation over twisted pair. This is only available for SK-982x series adapters with 1000baseT ports. Both full-duplex and half-duplex modes are supported.

1000baseSX

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

The sk driver supports the following media options:

full-duplex

Force full duplex operation

half-duplex

Force half duplex operation.

The sk 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 sk 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).