AWI(4) | Device Drivers Manual | AWI(4) |
awi
—
awi* at pcmcia? function ?
awi
driver supports various IEEE 802.11 wireless
cards that run AMD PCnetMobile firmware based on the AMD 79c930 controller
with the Intersil (formerly Harris) PRISM radio chipset. It provides access to
32kb of memory shared between the controller and the host. All host/device
interaction is accomplished via this shared memory, which can be accessed
either via PCMCIA or I/O memory spaces. The awi
driver
encapsulates all IP and ARP traffic in 802.11 frames.
The driver works both in infrastructure mode and in ad-hoc (independent BSS) mode.
In infrastructure mode, it communicates with an Access Point, which serves as a link-layer bridge between an Ethernet segment and the wireless network. An access point also provides roaming capability, which allows a wireless node to move between access points.
In ad-hoc mode, the device communicates peer to peer. Although it is more efficient to communicate between wireless nodes, the coverage is limited spatially due to the lack of roaming capability.
In addition to these two modes in the IEEE 802.11 specification,
the awi
driver also supports a variant of ad-hoc
mode outside of the spec for DS radio cards. This makes it possible to
communicate with the WaveLAN ad-hoc mode of
wi(4) driver. The NWID has no
effect in this mode.
Another mode added to the awi
driver can
be used with old Melco access points with 2Mbps cards. This mode actually
uses the IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc mode with encapsulation of raw Ethernet packets
(including headers) in 802.11 frames.
For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8) and ifmedia(4).
awi
driver include:
The original Xircom Netwave AirSurfer is supported by the cnw(4) driver, and the PRISM-II cards are supported by the wi(4) driver.
Am79C930 PCnet Mobile Single-Chip Wireless LAN Media Access Controller, http://www.amd.com.
awi
device driver first appeared in
NetBSD 1.5.
awi
driver was written by
Bill Sommerfeld ⟨sommerfeld@NetBSD.org⟩.
It was then completely rewritten to support cards with the DS phy and ad-hoc
mode by
January 2, 2006 | NetBSD 9.4 |