MII(4)

NAME
mii - IEEE 802.3 Media Independent Interface

SYNOPSIS
exphy* at mii? phy ?
icsphy* at mii? phy ?
inphy* at mii? phy ?
lxtphy* at mii? phy ?
nsphy* at mii? phy ?
qsphy* at mii? phy ?
rtpphy* at mii? phy ?
sqphy* at mii? phy ?
tlphy* at mii? phy ?

DESCRIPTION
Media Independent Interface is an IEEE standard serial bus for connecting MACs (network controllers) to PHYs (physical media interfaces). The mii layer allows network device drivers to share support code for various PHY models, and allows unused support for PHYs which are not present in a system to be removed from the kernel.

Network device drivers which use the mii layer carry the “mii” autoconfiguration attribute. This allows kernel configuration files to simply specify PHYs as described above in the synopsis.

The following is an example of the messages displayed when a network interface with an attached PHY is detected by the kernel:

    epic0 at pci0 dev 12 function 0: SMC EPIC/100 Fast Ethernet
    epic0: interrupting at kn20aa irq 4
    epic0: SMC9432TX, Ethernet address 00:e0:29:07:17:c4
    qsphy0 at epic0 phy 3: QS6612 10/100 media interface, rev. 1
    qsphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

All PHY drivers display the media types supported by the PHY when it is detected by the kernel. These media types are valid media keywords for use with the ifconfig(8) program.

SEE ALSO
exphy(4), icsphy(4), ifmedia(4), inphy(4), intro(4), lxtphy(4), nsphy(4), qsphy(4), rtpphy(4), sqphy(4), tlphy(4), ifconfig(8)