Whither ep(4) on 9.3-RELEASE?

Ian Smith smithi at nimnet.asn.au
Tue Nov 11 10:32:11 UTC 2014


In a conversation on questions@ re natd(8), Gary said he was about to 
upgrade to 9.3 from some (embarrassingly :) old version, and I said:

 >> Strangely, there's no man page for ep nor if_ep on 8.x or 9.x?

To which Gary replied:

 > ugh.  That will be interesting when my upgrade starts in a few days.  
 > Dang.
 > man ep
 > ep -- Ethernet driver for 3Com Etherlink III (3c5x9) interfaces

Firstly, I was wrong about 8.x, maybe I'd been looking for 'man if_ep'.  
On 8.2-R (i386) there is an ep(4) and:

smithi on t23% ll /boot/kernel/*ep.ko* | grep -v wlan
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   28687 Jul  8  2011 /boot/kernel/if_ep.ko
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  104779 Jul  8  2011 /boot/kernel/if_ep.ko.symbols

But on 9.3-R (well, 9.3-PRERELEASE of June 25th, amd64):

smithi at x200:/sys/dev/acpica % ll /boot/kernel/*ep*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   24488 Jun 25 15:45 /boot/kernel/if_epair.ko*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   73912 Jun 25 15:45 /boot/kernel/if_epair.ko.symbols*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   16584 Jun 25 15:45 /boot/kernel/uep.ko*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   51056 Jun 25 15:45 /boot/kernel/uep.ko.symbols*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   24472 Jun 25 15:46 /boot/kernel/wlan_wep.ko*
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  113632 Jun 25 15:46 /boot/kernel/wlan_wep.ko.symbols*

Moreover,

a) http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.3R/hardware.html does list ep(4) 
for the 3C5x9, as does 8.2R/hardware.html, for [i386,pc98,amd64]

b) But in these and any other versions back to 7.4-stable, there is no 
ep(All sections), nor if_ep, at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi

Ah, hang on .. finally found it, under 9.3-R and older releases, but 
only if not leaving 'Default' as architecture, but only specifically 
when choosing 'i386' (which seems weird) though the hardware list (and 
ep(4) under i386) for 9.3R says:

[i386,pc98,amd64] The ep(4) driver supports Ethernet adapters based on 
the 3Com 3C5x9 Etherlink III Parallel Tasking chipset, including:

Further, hardware.html for 10.0R, 10.0-stable and even 10.1-stable all 
show ep(4) for i386 only .. but NOT for 10.1R, even when choosing i386?

So maybe this is only a doc error?  My 9.3 above is amd64, so apparently 
ep(4) was not (ever?) supported under amd64, and pc98 is gone now, eh?

So can anyone confirm that ep(4) is present on 9.3-R, even if only i386?

cheers, Ian


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