vx — 3Com EtherLink III / Fast EtherLink III (3c59x) Ethernet driver
Contents
Bugs
The vx driver is known not to reset the adapter correctly following a warm boot on some systems.
The vx driver has not been exhaustively tested with all the models of cards that it claims to support.
Debian October 24, 2018 VX(4)
Caveats
Some early-revision 3c590 cards are defective and suffer from many receive overruns, which cause lost
packets. The author has attempted to implement a test for it based on the information supplied by 3Com,
but the test resulted mostly in spurious warnings.
The performance of this driver is somewhat limited by the fact that it uses only polled-mode I/O and does
not make use of the bus-mastering capability of the cards.
Deprecation Notice
The vx driver is not present in FreeBSD 13.0 and later. See
https://github.com/freebsd/fcp/blob/master/fcp-0101.md for more information.
Description
The vx driver provides support for the 3Com “Vortex” chipset.
The medium selection can be influenced by the following link flags to the ifconfig(8) command:
link0 Use the AUI port.
link1 Use the BNC port.
link2 Use the UTP port.
Diagnostics
All other diagnostics indicate either a hardware problem or a bug in the driver.
Hardware
The vx driver supports the following cards:
• 3Com 3c590 EtherLink III PCI
• 3Com 3c595 Fast EtherLink III PCI in 10 Mbps mode
History
The vx device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. It was derived from the ep driver, from which it
inherits most of its limitations.
Name
vx — 3Com EtherLink III / Fast EtherLink III (3c59x) Ethernet driver
See Also
arp(4), netintro(4), ng_ether(4), ifconfig(8)
Synopsis
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel configuration file:
devicevx
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):
if_vx_load="YES"
