DESCRIPTION
The nge driver provides support for various NICs based on the National Semiconductor DP83820 and DP83821 Gigabit Ethernet controller chips. The DP83820 supports TBI (ten bit interface) and GMII transceivers, which means it can be used with either copper or 1000baseX fiber applications. The DP83820 supports TCP/IP checksum offload and VLAN tagging/insertion as well as a 2048-bit multicast hash filter and up to 4 pattern match buffers.
Most cards also use the DP83861 10/100/1000 copper gigabit transceiver chip, which supports autonegotiation of 10, 100 and 1000Mbps modes in full or half duplex.
The DP83820 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 nge driver supports the following media types:
