2 .\" Copyright (c) 1997, Jim Binkley
3 .\" All rights reserved.
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37 .Nd T1 speed ISA/radio lan card
39 .Cd "device wl0 at isa? port 0x300 irq 5"
40 .Sh DEPRECATION NOTICE
43 driver will be removed in
48 driver controls a radio lan card system made originally by
49 NCR, then ATT, now Lucent.
50 The system is spread-spectrum radio
51 at around 915 MHz (or 2.4 GHz).
52 With the supplied omni-directional antennae,
53 about 400 feet (indoors, more outdoors) can be covered in circumference.
54 This card can talk to the companion (wlp0) pccard.
56 from 1 megabit to theoretically 2 megabits (roughly T1 in speed).
58 The card has three fundamental hardware
59 units, a so-called PSA or programmable storage area, a radio modem,
60 and a Ethernet lan controller.
61 The latter component is the
62 ancient (and not very honorable) Intel 82586 Ethernet chip.
63 Fundamentally it appears to the operating system as an Ethernet system,
64 and speaks IEEE MAC addresses.
65 The radio modem simply translates
66 Ethernet packets to/from radio packets, that are either at 2.4 GHz
67 or 915 MHz depending on the radio modem.
68 It supports a collision
71 supports promiscuous mode, broadcast, and multicasting
72 (although there is a glitch
74 "It thinks it is Ethernet".
77 depends on the kind of antennae deployed with it.
79 applications are possible as are Ethernet-like lan use.
81 ships an omni-directional antennae that works in the
82 vicinity of 400 feet (indoors).
83 Point to point antennae can be purchased that will go miles.
85 The card can either be initialized with the vendor supplied DOS setup software.
86 Typically minimally an IRQ, port, and Network ID must be supplied.
89 utility can now be used to do this work from
91 The card is "not" plug and play.
92 The network id controls whether one set of cards can hear another.
93 If different, cards will read physical packets, but they will be discarded
96 In addition to the config utility, there are several sysctl
97 switches that can be used to modify runtime parameters.
100 variables are as follows:
102 .It "machdep.wl_xmit_delay <useconds>"
103 This variable will cause the driver to insert a delay on transmit.
105 The delay should probably be a bit longer
106 on faster cpus and less on slower cpus.
107 It exists because the 82586
108 was not designed to work with Pentium-speed cpu systems and if overdriven
109 will have copious xmit side errors.
110 .It machdep.wl_ignore_nwid <0 | 1>
111 This switch defaults to 0; i.e., the nwid is not ignored.
113 be set to 1 to cause the nwid to not be used.
115 when the device is in promiscuous mode as one can watch for all
116 packets and ignore nwid differences.
117 .It machdep.wl_xmit_watch <milliseconds>
118 This switch is not currently useful.
119 .It machdep.wl_gather_snr <milliseconds>
120 This switch is not currently useful.
122 There is also a signal strength cache in the driver.
123 It may be interrogated
127 are checked for certain hardware radio-modem values including signal
128 strength, silence, and quality, which range fro 0..63, 0..63, and 0..15
130 Thus one can read out signal strenth values to see
131 how close/far peer nodes are.
132 The signal strength cache is indexed by
134 There are two sysctls that change how it filters packets.
137 .It machdep.wl_wlcache_mcastonly <0 | 1>
138 By default this switch is on.
139 It forces the cache to filter out
141 Only broadcast or multicast packets are accepted.
142 .It machdep.wl_wlcache_iponly <0 | 1>
143 By default this switch is on.
144 It forces the driver to discard non-IP
145 packets and also stores the IP src address.
146 ARP packets are ignored,
147 as are any other network protocol barring IPv4 packets.
153 .Pa http://www.wavelan.com
157 driver was written by
159 (thousands of years ago?) and
160 appears to be based on an even older Intel 82586 driver.
162 controller was one of the first (if not the first?) integrated lan
163 controller on the block.
164 That does not mean it was the best either.
165 Anders ported and or created a driver for the ISA wavelan and PCCARD
166 wavelan system too (wlp).
167 .An Robert T. Morris, Jr.
168 ported the Mach drivers to BSDI.
175 driver only to 2.2.2.
176 Jim and Michael have been
178 The current state of the driver is NOT ANYONE'S
186 Too numerous to mention.
189 The 82586 has numerous defects.
190 It may experience transmit-side
191 errors when modern faster cpus send packets at it faster than it can handle.
192 The driver (and probably the chip) does not support an all multicast mode.
193 As a result, it can be used with applications like
194 .Xr mrouted 8 Pq Pa ports/net/mrouted ,
195 but it must go into promiscuous mode for that to work.
197 is slow to change modes from "normal" to promiscuous mode, presumably
198 due to delays in the configuration code.