AWI(4) BSD Programmer's Manual AWI(4)NAMEawi - BayStack 650 IEEE 802.11FH PCMCIA wireless network driver
SYNOPSIS
awi* at pcmcia? function ?
DESCRIPTION
The awi driver provides support for wireless adapters based upon the AMD
802.11 PCnet Mobile firmware. This includes the following adapters:
Bay Networks BayStack 650
Bay Networks BayStack 660
Bay Network AirSurfer Pro
AMD Am79C930
Icom SL-200
Nokia C020
Farallon Communications SkyLINE Wireless
Zoom Air-4000
The PCnet Mobile design is based on an AMD 79c930 controller, which pro-
vides access to 32kb of memory shared between the controller and the
host. All host/device interaction is via this shared memory, which can be
accessed either via PCMCIA memory space or I/O space. The awi driver en-
capsulates all IP and ARP traffic as 802.11 frames. Transmit speed is
fixed at 1Mbps.
The driver currently only works in infrastructure mode, communicating
with an Access Point which serves as a link-layer bridge between an Eth-
ernet and the wireless network.
This card seems to take between 5 and 20 seconds after it has been
brought up to synchronize with an AP. When using dhclient(8) to automati-
cally configure an address on this card, it may be advisable to delay the
invocation of dhclient for about 10 seconds after the card is brought up
using ifconfig(8).
DIAGNOSTICS
awi0: unable to allocate memory space; using i/o only Indicates that the
driver was not able to allocate 32kb of PCMCIA bus address space into
which to map the device; the driver will use the (slightly slower) i/o-
space only access methods to read and write to the shared memory. This
message is in some sense to be expected and should not be a cause for
alarm. See pcmcia(4) for information on how to increase the memory avail-
able to the PCMCIA controller.
awi0: selftest failed (code %x) The device failed to pass its internal
selftest.
awi0: device failed to complete selftest (code %x) The device failed to
complete its self test within 5 seconds.
awi0: device timeout
awi0: timeout waiting for command completion The device failed to gen-
erate an interrupt to acknowledge a command.
awi0: transmit timeout The device failed to generate an interrupt to
acknowledge a transmitted packet.
awi0: large frame truncated The system handed the driver a packet which
was too large to transmit in one piece.
awi0: device enable failed The system was unable to power on the card.
awi0: associated with %s, SSID: %s The device has successfully synchron-
ized with the identified Access Point and is ready to relay traffic.
awi0: no recent beacon from %s; rescanning The device has not heard a
beacon from its currently associated Access Point recently, and is look-
ing for a new Access Point.
awi0: received deauth The Access Point the card was most recently asso-
ciated with has forgotten about us.
SEE ALSOarp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pcmcia(4), hostname.if(5),
ifconfig(8)
Am79C930 PCnet Mobile Single-Chip Wireless LAN Media Access Controller,
http://www.amd.com.
HISTORY
The awi device driver first appeared in OpenBSD 2.7.
AUTHORS
The awi driver was written by Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@netbsd.org> and
ported to OpenBSD by
Angelos D. Keromytis <angelos@dsl.cis.upenn.edu>
BUGS
Doesn't support ad-hoc mode or WEP. Round trip times seem higher than
what one might expect.
MirOS BSD #10-current March 20, 2004 1
