1000baseTX?

[Doug White]

On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 sthaug at nethelp.no wrote:

> > > In man pages, dmesg and ifconfig of FreeBSD5, GbE operation over
> > > twisted pair is mostly referred as '1000baseTX'.  I guess most of them
> > > should be replaced by '1000baseT'.  1000base"TX" and 1000base"T" are
> > > different standard and they are not compatible ("TX" needs CAT6 cable
> > > and uses pairs in different way).  Also 1000baseTX support is very
> > > rare yet.  I'm sorry I'm not sure if some devices really support "TX".
> >
> > Do you have any documentation to back up this claim?
>
> 1000baseTX was an attempt at producing less expensive hardware (NICs
> etc) that could be used with Cat6 cabling. It is basically dead, and
> was never blessed by the IEEE.
>
> The IEEE is quite clear on the fact that Gigabit Ethernet on Cat5 UTP
> is called 1000Base-T. See for instance Chapter 34, "Introduction to
> 1000 Mb/s baseband network", in IEEE 802.3-2002, available from
>
> 	http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/802.3.html
>
> So using 1000baseTX as the name in FreeBSD is clearly wrong.

Thanks for doing the research on this. Its too bad that this is in a
user-visible knob, so changing it would break scripts.  We could create an
alias for it, but that'd log an already busy mediatypes list.

Considering that has been that way since 4.x and this is the first
complaint I've heard of, I'm tempted to let it slide, at least for 5.x.
6.x could probably get away with it if someone offered the megapatch to
fix all the drivers (or whatever code does the mediatype foo).

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org