BWI(4) | Device Drivers Manual | BWI(4) |
bwi
— Broadcom
AirForce IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device
bwi* at cardbus?
bwi* at pci?
The bwi
driver provides support for
Broadcom AirForce based PCI/Cardbus network adapters.
These are the modes the bwi
driver can
operate in:
The bwi
driver can be configured to use
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA-PSK and
WPA2-PSK). WPA is the current encryption standard for wireless networks. It
is strongly recommended that WEP not be used as the sole mechanism to secure
wireless communication, due to serious weaknesses in it. The
bwi
driver relies on the software 802.11 stack for
both encryption and decryption of data frames.
The transmit speed is user-selectable or can be adapted automatically by the driver depending on the received signal strength and on the number of hardware transmission retries.
The bwi
driver can be configured at
runtime with ifconfig(8) or
on boot with
hostname.if(5).
The driver needs a firmware file which is loaded when an interface is brought up:
A prepackaged version of the firmware can be installed using fw_update(1).
The following cards are among those supported by the
bwi
driver:
Card | Chip | Bus | Standard |
Apple Airport Extreme | BCM4306 | PCI | b/g |
Apple Airport Extreme | BCM4318 | PCI | b/g |
ASUS WL-138g | BCM4318 | PCI | b/g |
Buffalo WLI-CB-G54 | BCM4306 | CardBus | b/g |
Compaq R4035 onboard | BCM4306 | PCI | b/g |
HP nx6125 | BCM4319 | PCI | b/g |
Linksys WPC54G Ver 3 | BCM4318 | CardBus | b/g |
Linksys WPC54GS Ver 2 | BCM4318 | CardBus | b/g |
TRENDnet TEW-401PCplus | BCM4306 | CardBus | b/g |
US Robotics 5411 | BCM4318 | CardBus | b/g |
The following example scans for available networks:
# ifconfig bwi0 scan
The following hostname.if(5) example configures bwi0 to join network “mynwid”, using WPA key “mywpakey”, obtaining an IP address using DHCP:
nwid mynwid wpakey mywpakey dhcp
arp(4), cardbus(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pci(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)
The bwi
driver first appeared in
OpenBSD 4.3.
The bwi
driver was written for
DragonFly by Sepherosa
Ziehau and ported to OpenBSD by
Jonathan Gray and Marcus
Glocker.
Some chips are incorrectly calibrated due to the lack of documentation, which can slow the amount of traffic to the point of being unusable. Furthermore this driver only supports firmware version 3.
July 15, 2018 | OpenBSD-6.4 |