AN(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual AN(4)NAMEan — Aironet Communications 4500/4800 wireless network adapter driver
SYNOPSIS
device an
device an0 at isa? port 0x140 irq 5
DESCRIPTION
The an driver provides support for Aironet Communications 4500 and 4800
wireless network adapters. This includes the ISA, PCI and PCMCIA vari‐
eties. The 4500 series adapters operate at 1 and 2Mbps while the 4800
series can operate at 1, 2, 5.5 and 11Mbps. The ISA, PCI and PCMCIA
devices are all based on the same core PCMCIA modules and all have the
same programming interface, however unlike the Lucent WaveLAN/IEEE cards,
the ISA and PCI cards appear to the host as normal ISA and PCI devices
and do not require any PCCARD support.
The PCMCIA Aironet cards require kernel pccard driver support. ISA cards
can either be configured to use ISA Plug and Play or to use a particular
I/O address and IRQ by properly setting the DIP switches on the board.
(The default switch setting is for plug and play.) The an driver has
Plug and Play support and will work in either configuration, however when
using a hard-wired I/O address and IRQ, the driver configuration and the
NIC's switch settings must agree. PCI cards require no switch settings
of any kind and will be automatically probed and attached.
All host/device interaction with the Aironet cards is via programmed I/O.
The Aironet devices support 802.11 and 802.3 frames, power management,
BSS (infrastructure) and IBSS (ad-hoc) operation modes. The an driver
encapsulates all IP and ARP traffic as 802.11 frames, however it can
receive either 802.11 or 802.3 frames. Transmit speed is selectable
between 1Mbps, 2Mbps, 5.5Mbps, 11Mbps or "auto" (the NIC automatically
chooses the best speed).
By default, the an driver configures the Aironet card for infrastructure
operation.
For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8)DIAGNOSTICS
an%d: init failed The Aironet card failed to come ready after an ini‐
tialization command was issued.
an%d: failed to allocate %d bytes on NIC The driver was unable to allo‐
cate memory for transmit frames in the NIC's on-board RAM.
an%d: device timeout The Aironet card failed to generate an interrupt to
acknowledge a transmit command.
SEE ALSOarp(4), ifmedia(4), netintro(4), ancontrol(8), ifconfig(8)HISTORY
The an device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.0.
AUTHORS
The an driver was written by Bill Paul ⟨wpaul@ee.columbia.edu⟩.
BSD September 10, 1999 BSD
