WI(4)

NAME
wi - Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11 PCMCIA wireless network driver

SYNOPSIS
wi* at pcmcia? function ?

DESCRIPTION
The wi driver provides support for WaveLAN/IEEE PCCARD adapters (also known as WaveLAN II cards). 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. Both the original 2Mbps WaveLAN/IEEE cards and the newer 6Mbps WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo adapters are supported.

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 wi 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 fixed, 2Mbps fixed or 2Mbps with auto fallback. For WaveLAN/IEEE Turbo adapters, speeds up to 6Mbps are available.

By default, the wi driver configures the WaveLAN card for ad-hoc operation. In this mode, stations can communicate among each other without the aid of an access point. To join a service set, the driver must be set for BSS mode using the wiconfig(8) utility.

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

HARDWARE
Cards supported by the wi driver include:

Lucent Wavelan/IEEE 2.0Mb Bronze

Lucent Wavelan/IEEE 2.0Mb Silver

Melco AIR CONNECT WLI-PCM-L11

DEC/Cabletron RoamAbout 802.11 DS High Rate

DIAGNOSTICS

wi%d: init failed The WaveLAN failed to come ready after an initialization command was issued.

wi%d: failed to allocate %d bytes on NIC The driver was unable to allocate memory for transmit frames in the NIC's on-board RAM.

wi%d: device timeout The WaveLAN failed to generate an interrupt to acknowledge a transmit command. One reason can be that the board is mis-configured, see wiconfig(8).

SEE ALSO
arp(4), netintro(4), ifconfig(8), wiconfig(8) HCF Light programming specification, http://www.wavelan.com.

HISTORY
The wi device driver first appeared in NetBSD 1.4.3.

AUTHOR
The wi driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu>.