Technical data

le(7D) Devices SunOS 5.5
NAME le, lebuffer, ledma − Am7990 (LANCE) Ethernet device driver
SYNOPSIS /dev/le
DESCRIPTION The Am7990 (LANCE) Ethernet driver is a multi-threaded, loadable, clonable, STREAMS
hardware driver supporting the connectionless Data Link Provider Interface, dlpi(7P),
over a LANCE Ethernet controller. The motherboard and add-in SBus LANCE controllers
of several varieties are supported. Multiple LANCE controllers installed within the sys-
tem are supported by the driver. The le driver provides basic support for theLANCE
hardware. Functions include chip initialization, frame transmit and receive, multicast
and promiscuous support, and error recovery and reporting.
APPLICATION
PROGRAMMING
INTERFACE
The cloning character-special device /dev/le is used to access all LANCE controllers
installed within the system.
The lebuffer and ledma device drivers are bus nexus drivers which cooperate with the le
leaf driver in supporting theLANCE hardware functions over several distinct slave-only
and DVMA LANCE -based Ethernet controllers. The lebuffer and ledma bus nexi drivers
are not directly accessible to the user.
le and DLPI The le driver is a “style 2” Data Link Service provider. All M_PROTO and M_PCPROTO
type messages are interpreted as DLPI primitives. Valid DLPI primitives are defined in
<sys/dlpi.h>. Refer to dlpi(7P) for more information. An explicit DL_ATTACH_REQ
message by the user is required to associate the opened stream with a particular device
(ppa). The ppa ID is interpreted as an unsigned long data type and indicates the
corresponding device instance (unit) number. An error (DL_ERROR_ACK) is returned by
the driver if the ppa field value does not correspond to a valid device instance number
for this system. The device is initializedon first attach and de-initialized (stopped) on
last detach.
The values returned by the driver in theDL_INFO_ACK primitive in response to the
DL_INFO_REQ from the user are as follows:
The maximum SDU is 1500 (ETHERMTU - defined in <sys/ethernet.h>).
The minimumSDU is 0.
The dlsap address length is 8.
The MAC type is DL_ETHER.
The sap length value is −2 meaning the physical address component is fol-
lowed immediately by a 2 byte sap component within theDLSAP address.
The service mode is DL_CLDLS.
No optional quality of service (QOS) support is included at present so theQOS
fields are 0.
The provider style isDL_STYLE2.
The version isDL_VERSION_2.
The broadcast address value is Ethernet/IEEE broadcast address (0xFFFFFF).
7D-186 modified 23 Aug 1994