if_bwn (4)

Leading comments

Copyright (c) 2009 Christian Brueffer
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
   documentation and/or...

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man4/if_bwn.4freebsd".)

NAME

bwn - Broadcom BCM43xx IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network driver

SYNOPSIS

To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:

device siba_bwn device bwn device wlan device wlan_amrr device firmware

Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf5:

if_bwn_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The driver provides support for Broadcom BCM43xx based PCI/CardBus network adapters.

It supports station and monitor mode operation. Only one virtual interface may be configured at any time. For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

This driver requires firmware to be loaded before it will work. The ports/net/bwn-firmware-kmod port needs to be installed before ifconfig(8) will work. Most cases you need to use bwn_v4_ucode module but if you are a LP (low power) PHY user please uses bwn_v4_lp_ucode module.

HARDWARE

The driver supports Broadcom BCM43xx based wireless devices, including:

Card Ta Chip Ta Bus Ta Standard

"Apple Airport Extreme   BCM4318 PCI     b/g"

"ASUS WL-138gBCM4318PCIb/g"

"Buffalo WLI-CB-G54SBCM4318CardBusb/g"

"Dell Wireless 1390BCM4311Mini PCIb/g"

"Dell Wireless 1470BCM4318Mini PCIb/g"

"Dell Truemobile 1400BCM4309Mini PCIb/g"

"HP Compaq 6715bBCM4312PCIb/g"

"HP nx6125BCM4319PCIb/g"

"Linksys WPC54G Ver 3BCM4318CardBusb/g"

"Linksys WPC54GS Ver 2BCM4318CardBusb/g"

"US Robotics 5411BCM4318CardBusb/g"

Users of older Broadcom chipsets (BCM4301, BCM4303 and BCM4306 rev 2)
must use bwi(4) because the v4 version of the firmware does not support these chips. The newer firmware is too big to fit into these old chips.

EXAMPLES

Join an existing BSS network (i.e., connect to an access point):

ifconfig wlan create wlandev bwn0 inet 192.168.0.20 \
    netmask 0xffffff00

Join a specific BSS network with network name ``my_net ''

"ifconfig wlan create wlandev bwn0 ssid my_net up"

Join a specific BSS network with 64-bit WEP encryption:

ifconfig wlan create wlandev bwn0 ssid my_net \
        wepmode on wepkey 0x1234567890 weptxkey 1 up

LOADER TUNABLES

Tunables can be set at the loader(8) prompt before booting the kernel or stored in loader.conf5.

hw.bwn.msi_disable

This tunable disables MSI support on the hardware. The default value is 0.

hw.bwn.usedma

This tunable enables DMA operations on the hardware. If the value is 0, PIO mode would be used. The default value is 1.

SEE ALSO

arp(4), bwi(4), cardbus(4), intro(4), pci(4), wlan(4), wlan_amrr4, ifconfig(8), wpa_supplicant8

HISTORY

The driver first appeared in Fx 8.1 .

AUTHORS

An -nosplit The driver was written by An Weongyo Jeong Aq weongyo@FreeBSD.org .

CAVEATS

Some LP PHY devices have DMA operation problems that in that case try to use PIO mode.