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New manpage for the Wavelan (wl) driver.

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Submitted by:	Jim Binkley <jrb@cs.pdx.edu>
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msmith 1997-08-01 03:32:39 +00:00
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.\"
.\" Copyright (c) 1996 Michael Smith
.\" Copyright (c) 1997, Jim Binkley
.\" All rights reserved.
.\"
.\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
@ -10,6 +10,11 @@
.\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
.\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
.\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
.\" 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
.\" must display the following acknowledgement:
.\" This product includes software developed by Jim Binkley
.\" 4. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products
.\" derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
.\"
.\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
.\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
@ -23,122 +28,120 @@
.\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
.\" SUCH DAMAGE.
.\"
.\" $Id$
.\"
.Dd March 4, 1997
.Dt ED 4 i386
.\" $Id$
.Dd July 7, 1997
.Dt WL 4 i386
.Os FreeBSD
.Sh NAME
.Nm wl
.Nd
NCR Wavelan device driver
.Nd T1 speed ISA/radio lan card
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Cd "device wl0 at isa? port 0x300 net irq ? vector wlintr"
.Cd "device wl0 at isa? port 0x300 net irq 5 vector wlintr"
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Nm
driver provides support for the ISA bus AT&T/NCR/Lucent Wavelan
ethernet-like wireless network cards.
.Nm wl
driver controls a radio lan card system made originally by
NCR, then ATT, now Lucent. The system is spread-spectrum radio
at around 915 mhz (or 2.4 ghz). With the supplied omni-directional antennae,
about 400 feet (indoors, more outdoors) can be covered in circumference.
This card can talk to the companion (wlp0) pccard. Speeds vary
from 1 megabit to theoretically 2 megabits (roughly T1 in speed).
.Pp
All card configuration values except for the base address are read from the PSA
(Parameter Storage Area) on the card, which can be configured with the
.Xr wlconfig 8
program. The base address for the card is set by dipswitches; see the manual
supplied with the card for details.
.Pp
The
.Nm
driver does not accept any flags, however its behaviour can be controlled with
a number of sysctl values:
.Bl -hang -offset indent
.It Em machdep.wl_xmit_delay
On some systems, the driver is too fast for the Wavelan card. This value can be
tweaked to slow the output rate of the driver at the expense of CPU performance.
A value of 200 is believed to be acceptable for 486 systems, while 1000 is
considered adequate for a 166MHz Pentium.
.It Em machdep.wl_xmit_watch
Causes extra debugging messages concerning the state of transmitted packets to
be printed.
.It Em machdep.wl_gather_snr
SNR statistics are gathered. This is not completely implemented yet.
.El
.Sh DIAGNOSTICS
The card has 3 fundmental hardware
units, a so-called PSA or programmable storage area, a radio modem,
and a ethernet lan controller. The latter component is the
ancient (and not very honorable) Intel 82586 ethernet chip.
Fundamentally it appears to the operating system as an ethernet system,
and speaks IEEE MAC addresses. The radio modem simply translates
ethernet packets to/from radio packets, that are either at 2.4 Ghz
or 915 mhz depending on the radio modem. It supports a collision
avoidance scheme. The lan controller
supports promiscuous mode, broadcast, and multicasting
(although there is a glitch
in the latter). "It thinks it is ethernet".
.Pp
How it is used
depends on the kind of antennae deployed with it. Point to point
applications are possible as are ethernet-like lan use. The vendor
ships an omni-directional antennae that works in the
vicinity of 400 feet (indoors).
Point to point antennae can be purchased that will go miles.
.Sh SETUP
The card can either be initialized with the vendor supplied DOS setup software.
Typically minimally an IRQ, port, and Network ID must be supplied.
Michael Smith's
.Nm wlconfig(8)
utility can now be used to do this work from
the UNIX side. The card is "not" plug and play.
The network id controls whether one set of cards can hear another.
If different, cards will read physical packets, but they will be discarded
by the radio modem.
.Sh CONTROL
In addition to the config utility, there are several sysctl
switches that can be used to modify runtime parameters.
The
.Nm sysctl(8)
variables are as follows:
.Bl -diag
.It "wl%d: PSA corrupt (invalid IRQ value)"
The IRQ value in the PSA is illegal. The card will be configured not to generate
any interrupts, ie. it will not work as a network device, however it will be possible
to use
.Xr wlconfig 8
to reconfigure the IRQ to a sensible value.
.It "wl%d init(): trouble resetting board."
.It "wl%d bldcu(): iscp_busy timeout."
.It "wl%d bldcu(): not ready after reset."
The board failed to respond correctly during reset and configuration.
.It "wl%d: busy?!"
While attempting to queue a packet for transmission, the card claims to
be busy although we were sure it wasn't.
.It "wl%d read(): board is not running."
An attempt was made to read a packet from the card, but we don't think that
it's running. Should never happen.
.It "wl%d read(): Invalid buffer"
The i82586 on the card has corrupted its buffers.
.It "wl%d read(): hwrst trouble."
Having failed to meet expectations, the i82586 on the card is refusing to reset.
.It "wl%d read(): No mbuf nth"
An error occurred allocating mbufs to copy a received packet to.
.It "wl%d ioctl(): board is not running"
The interface was marked as DOWN but still RUNNING. Harmless.
.It "wlack() int bits disappeared : %04x != int_type %04x"
While acknowledging an interrupt, some of the interrupt sources on the i83586
went away.
.It "wl%d: xmt intr but not busy, CU %04x"
A transmit interrupt occurred but we are not expecting one.
.It "wl%d: xmt intr but ac_status == 0"
A transmit interrupt occurred but there is no status to indicate that one should
have been generated.
.It "wl%d: xmt aborted"
The transmission of a packet was aborted.
.It "wl%d: no CTS"
A packet was not transmitted because the CTS input to the i82586 went away.
.It "wl%d: DMA underrun"
The DMA hardware on the Wavelan card failed, causing an outgoing packet to be
lost.
.It "wl%d: xmt deferred"
Transmission of a packet was deferred to avoid other traffic.
.It "wl%d: heart beat"
The i82586 thought it heard a heartbeat signal. This usually means that there's
someone else transmitting at the same time.
.It "wl%d: too many collisions"
A packet was aborted because too many collisions occurred trying to send it.
.It "wl%d RCV: !OK %x"
A receive operation did not complete OK.
.It "wl%d: slow accepting xmit"
The i82586 on the card is taking a long time to accept a transmit command.
.It "wl%d: i82586 Self Test failed!"
Diagnostics on the i82586 failed.
.It "wl%d: %s failed; status = %d, inw = %x, outw = %x"
A command to the i82586 failed.
.It "wl%d wlack(): board not accepting command."
The card is not responding to an interrupt acknowledge.
.It "machdep.wl_xmit_delay <useconds>"
This variable will cause the driver to insert a delay on transmit.
250 is the default. The delay should probably be a bit longer
on faster cpus and less on slower cpus. It exists because the 82586
was not designed to work with pentium-speed cpu systems and if overdriven
will have copious xmit side errors.
.It machdep.wl_ignore_nwid <0 | 1>
This switch defaults to 0; i.e., the nwid is not ignored. It can
be set to 1 to cause the nwid to not be used. This may be useful
when the device is in promiscuous mode as one can watch for all
packets and ignore nwid differences.
.It machdep.wl_xmit_watch <milliseconds>
This switch is not currently useful.
.It machdep.wl_gather_snr <milliseconds>
This switch is not currently useful.
.Pp
There is also a signal strength cache in the driver. It may be interrogated
with
.Nm wlconfig(8) .
Incoming packets
are checked for certain hardware radio-modem values including signal
strength, silence, and quality, which range fro 0..63, 0..63, and 0..15
respectively. Thus one can read out signal strenth values to see
how close/far peer nodes are. The signal strength cache is indexed by
sender MAC address.
There are two sysctls that change how it filters packets. Both are on
by default.
.It machdep.wl_wlcache_mcastonly <0 | 1>
By default this switch is on. It forces the cache to filter out
unicast packets. Only broadcast or multicast packets are accepted.
.It machdep.wl_wlcache_iponly <0 | 1>
By default this switch is on. It forces the driver to discard non-IP
packets and also stores the IP src address. ARP packets are ignored,
as are any other network protocol barring IPv4 packets.
.El
.Sh CAVEATS
The cards are known to lose transmit interrupts under heavy load. Ajust the
machdep.wl_xmit_delay parameter to avoid this.
.Pp
On one test link, packet loss was significant enough to causes major lagging.
.Sh BUGS
The
.Nm
driver is very old and has been hacked on by many people. The i82586 is an
odd and funky device. The two are not necessarily a good mix.
The 82586 has numerous defects. It may experience transmit-side
errors when modern faster cpus send packets at it faster than it can handle.
The driver (and probably the chip) does not support an all multicast mode.
As a result, it can be used with applications like mrouted(8), but
it must go into promiscuous mode for that to work. The driver
is slow to change modes from "normal" to promiscuous mode, presumably
due to delays in the configuration code.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr wlconfig 8 ,
.Xr netintro 4 ,
.Xr ifconfig 8
.Xr sysctl 8 ,
.Xr http://www.wavelan.com
.Sh HISTORY
The
.Nm
device driver was written/ported for Mach by Anders Klemets, ported to BSD/OS
by Richard Morris, to FreeBSD 2.1 by Jim Binkley and to FreeBSD 2.2 by Michael
Smith. It has not appeared in any FreeBSD releases yet.
.Nm wl
driver was written by Anders Klemets (thousands of years ago?) and
appears to be based on an even older Intel 82586 driver. The 82586
controller was one of the first (if not the first?) integrated lan
controller on the block. That does not mean it was the best either.
Anders ported and or created a driver for the ISA wavelan and PCCARD
wavelan system too (wlp). Robert T. Morris, Jr. ported the Mach
drivers to BSDI. Jim Binkley ported them to FreeBSD 2.1. Michael
Smith ported the wl driver only to 2.2.2. Jim and Michael have been
maintaining them. The current state of the driver is NOT ANYONE'S
FAULT. Thanks to Bernie Doehner and Robert Buaas for contributions.
.Sh AUTHOR
Too numerous to mention. See above.