WI(4) | Device Drivers Manual | WI(4) |
wi
— WaveLAN/IEEE
and PRISM-II 802.11 wireless network driver
wi* at pcmcia? function ?
wi* at pci? dev ? function ?
The wi
driver provides support for Lucent
Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE PCCARD adapters (also known as WaveLAN II cards)
and various PCI/MiniPCI/PCCARD adapters which use Intersil PRISM-II and
PRISM-2.5 chipsets. Note that while Lucent sells both ISA and PCMCIA
WaveLAN/IEEE devices, the ISA product is actually a PCMCIA card in an ISA to
PCMCIA bridge adapter. Consequently, the wi
driver
is required for both the ISA and PCMCIA NICs. Also note that some of the
PRISM-II adapters works only at 3.3V, hence
cardbus(4) support is
required for those cards to set VCC correctly, even though they are 16-bit
cards.
The core of the WaveLAN/IEEE is the Lucent Hermes controller. All host/device interaction is via programmed I/O with the Hermes. The Hermes supports 802.11 and 802.3 frames, power management, BSS, WDS and ad-hoc operation modes. The Silver and the Gold cards of the WaveLAN/IEEE also support WEP. Unlike the other IEEE 802.11 network cards, the WaveLAN Gold cards accept 104 bits key (13 characters) for WEP encryption. The Intersil PRISM-II controller supports WEP as well.
The wi
driver encapsulates all traffic as
802.11 frames, however it can receive either 802.11 or 802.3 frames.
Transmit speed is selectable between 1Mbps fixed, 2Mbps fixed or 2Mbps with
auto fallback. For WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo adapters, speeds up to 6Mbps are
available. For WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo 11Mbps adapters and PRISM-II adapters,
speeds up to 11Mbps are available.
The wi
driver supports configuration of
Lucent cards for special ad-hoc operation. In this mode, the nwid is ignored
and stations can communicate among each other without the aid of an access
point. Note that this mode is specific to Lucent chips, and not in the IEEE
802.11 specification. Due to changes in the implementation of this special
ad-hoc mode, Lucent-based cards with different firmware revisions may not
interoperate in this mode. This mode is no longer the default and must be
selected using the
ifconfig(8) (media option
“adhoc,flag0”) utility.
Recent versions of Lucent and PRISM-II firmware support IBSS creation. IBSS is the standard IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc mode. In this mode, the nwid should be specified. At least one node must be able to create IBSS. The IBSS mode is enabled by “adhoc” or “ibss” media option. IBSS creation is automatically enabled if supported.
The wi
driver defaults to infrastructure
mode (i.e., using an access point).
Recent versions of PRISM-II firmware support operating as an 802.11 Access Point. In this mode, the Access Point station should set the nwid. This will create a standard 802.11 network, and the Access Point station will show up in an Access Point scan. This mode is enabled using the “hostap” media option.
For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8) and ifmedia(4).
Cards supported by the wi
driver
include:
The original PRISM-I chipset is supported by the awi(4) driver.
arp(4), ifmedia(4), netintro(4), pci(4), pcmcia(4), ifconfig(8), wiconfig(8)
HCF Light programming specification, http://www.wavelan.com.
The wi
device driver first appeared in
NetBSD 1.5.
The wi
driver was written by
Bill Paul
<wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>.
The execution of wiconfig(8) while the interface is down can produce some error messages.
June 2, 2016 | NetBSD 10.99 |