Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 04:33:02 -0400 (EDT) From: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> To: ernie@spooky.eis.net.au (Ernie Elu) Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: wi0 almost works with Wavelan Turbo card Message-ID: <199907190833.EAA26382@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> In-Reply-To: <199907190742.RAA41262@spooky.eis.net.au> from "Ernie Elu" at Jul 19, 99 05:42:24 pm
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Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Ernie Elu had to walk into mine and say: > > Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Ernie Elu had > > to walk into mine and say: > > > > > I am looking for help with getting a Lucent Wavelan Turbo ISA (Bronze) > > > card running. > > > > What speed is the card, exactly. > > It runs in 3 modes, I have been testing in high speed mode which is > supposed to be 10Mbps also the default mode. It can fall back to 2Mbps when > talking to older cards or other 802.11 compatible cards. The only Turbo cards that I know people have tested are the 6Mbps ones. I haven't heard anything about any faster ones from Lucent (I wasn't aware the they had released them yet). Actually, I'm curious to know what sort of performance people have observed with these cards. The tests I've been running with the Aironet 11Mbps cards have shown only about 6Mbps transfer speed between two stations in ad-hoc mode. I wonder if people are actually getting 10 or 11Mbps (even with Windows). > > > I installed a Wavelan Turbo PCMCIA card in my Toshiba 2520CDT notebook, and > > > an idetical card with the Wavelan ISA adapter board into an Advantech 6154 > > > Slot PC. > > > > I am not familiar with an "Advantech 6154 Slot PC." Please don't assume that > > everyone automatically knows your hardware by name. Describe it. In detail. > > > > It's a slot PC that plugs into an ISA passive backplane, popular with the > picobsd crowd. > > It has the following probed hardware: Bleh... you have a RealTek ethernet controller. Please tell me this isn't built onto the board. Couldn't they spend the extra ten cents for something better? > > > Any suggestions? > > > > No. I never obtained any real documentation from Lucent (they won't release > > the Hermes programming manual without NDA) and I don't have a turbo WaveLAN > > card so I'm unable to duplicate your problem on my own equipment. If I can't > > duplicate the problem and analyze it, I can't even begin to fix it. > > > > -Bill > > > I think the source to their Linux driver for the 802.11 card is at: No. This is not "the source to their Linux driver." If you had bothered to actually look at it, you would have found that this archive contains only object code for the parts that actually talk to the Hermes controller. Lucent has created an API library called the HCF (Hardware Control Functions -- Lucent is excessively acronym-happy) for communicating with the Hermes controller. There are really two versions: the full HCF, and the HCF Light. The full HCF is proprietary and Lucent will not release the source for it without an NDA. The HCF Light is available under the GPL, however it lacks several of the features in the full HCF, such as 802.11/Ethernet II frame encapsulation/decapsulation and the ability to download new firmware images to the card (among other things). There is also an HCF Light manual which is a stripped down version of the full HCF manual. The Linux driver was written for Lucent by another company under contract; it uses the proprietary version of the HCF which is distributed in object code form only. Furthermore, only x86 object code is provided. The only source they provide is for the interface code between the HCF ahd the Linux kernel. The FreeBSD driver does not use the HCF or the HCF Light: I spent a fair amount of time figuring out how the Hermes works based on the HCF Light code and wrote my own driver from scratch so that I could escape the clutches of the GPL. The correct thing for Lucent to do would have been to release the driver/firmware API manual for the Hermes controller so that people could design their own interface code instead of forcing the HCF down their throats. The idea behind the HCF is to provide a hardware-independent interface to the Hermes which is easily portable to multiple platforms. This is not a bad idea in general, but in this case the Hermes API is actually so simple that covering it up with the HCF only makes things more complicated. Unfortunately, Lucent won't release the Hermes manual without NDA at this time (if ever). > FTP://FTP.WAVELAN.COM/PUB/SOFTWARE/IEEE/PC_CARD/LINUX/wavelan2_cs-3.10.tar.gz > > It's supposed to work with the turbo card, according to the one line comment at: > http://www.wavelan.com/support/software/index.html All of the WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11 cards support the same programming interface, with one small difference which is that there are more speed selections available on the Turbo cards than on the older 2Mbps ones (the mechanism to set the speed is the same; you're just allowed to specify additional values). So the wi driver is *supposed* to work with the turbo cards, but since I don't actually have any I can't verify this. The only high speed wireless cards I have are the Aironet PC4800 and ISA4800 (for which I'm currently writing another driver) and I don't appear to have any problems with these. I cite them for comparison because they have a very similar programming interface to the WaveLANs (which is surprising really since I thought the Hermes API was proprietary to Lucent; it's possible that all of the people making 802.11 equipment got together and agreed on a general hardware spec, but if so it's news to me). The only thing that I can think of is that the driver is having trouble reading the packet data out of the card at high speed. The way the cards work, data is read from/written to the card 16 bits at a time via I/O registers (these are programmed I/O devices; there's no memory mapping). It's possible that at high speeds, the I/O gets thrown out of whack sometimes. It's actually possible to go back and re-read the frame from the NIC, although I'd much rather figure out the exact cause of the problem and deal with that rather that applying a bandaid to work around the problem (re-reading the received frame would hurt performance). > There is also a version 4 linux driver for the silver card, thats the one with > the WEV encryption. WEP, not WEV, and whether you have encryption or not depends on if it's supported by the firmware in your card, not on the driver (though you do have to do a few things in the driver to turn the encryption on). -Bill -- ============================================================================= -Bill Paul (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu Work: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research Home: wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City ============================================================================= "It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!" - Ren Hoek, "Space Madness" ============================================================================= To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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