AXEN(4) Device Drivers Manual AXEN(4)

axen — ASIX Electronics AX88178A, AX88179, AX88179A 10/100/Gigabit USB Ethernet device

axen* at uhub? port ?
rgephy* at mii?
ukphy* at mii?

The axen driver provides support for USB Ethernet adapters based on the ASIX Electronics AX88178A USB 2.0, and AX88179/AX88179A USB 3.0 chipsets including the following:

The axen driver supports the following media types:

Enable autoselection of the media type and options. This is the default. The user can manually override the autoselected mode by adding media options to the appropriate ifconfig.if(5) file.
Set 10Mbps operation.
Set 100Mbps (Fast Ethernet) operation.
Set 1000Mbps (Gigabit Ethernet) operation.

For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

It provides IPv4, TCPv4, UDPv4, TCPv6, UDPv6 checksumming, and TSOv4 segmentation offloading on capable hardware. It also supports VLAN-sized frames. It does not presently support other advertised features of the AX88179A, such as jumbo frames and Energy-Efficient Ethernet.

See usbnet(4) for diagnostics.

arp(4), mii(4), netintro(4), rgephy(4), ukphy(4), usb(4), usbnet(4), ifconfig.if(5), ifconfig(8)

The axen device driver first appeared in OpenBSD 5.4 and in NetBSD 7.0. AX88179A support first appeared in NetBSD 10.2.

The axen driver was written by Yojiro UO <yuo@nui.org> for OpenBSD and ported to NetBSD by NONAKA Kimihiro <nonaka@NetBSD.org>.

May 20, 2026 NetBSD 11.99