NAME

malo —

Marvell Libertas IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device

SYNOPSIS

malo* at cardbus?
malo* at pci?
malo* at pcmcia?

DESCRIPTION

The malo driver provides support for Marvell Libertas 88W8335/88W8310/88W8385 based PCI/CardBus/PCMCIA network adapters. The second generation 88W8335/88W8310 chipsets support 802.11b/g.

These are the modes the malo driver can operate in:

BSS mode: Also known as infrastructure mode, this is used when associating with an access point, through which all traffic passes. This mode is the default.
monitor mode: In this mode the driver is able to receive packets without associating with an access point. This disables the internal receive filter and enables the card to capture packets from networks which it wouldn't normally have access to, or to scan for access points.

The malo 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 malo driver relies on the software 802.11 stack for both encryption and decryption of data frames.

The malo driver can be configured at runtime with ifconfig(8) or on boot with hostname.if(5).

FILES

The driver needs a set of firmware files which are loaded when an interface is brought up:

/etc/firmware/malo8335-h
/etc/firmware/malo8335-m
/etc/firmware/malo8338
/etc/firmware/malo8385-h
/etc/firmware/malo8385-m

These firmware files are not free because Marvell refuses to grant distribution rights. As a result, even though OpenBSD includes the driver, the firmware files cannot be included and users have to download these files on their own.

A prepackaged version of the firmware can be installed using fw_update(1).

HARDWARE

The following cards are among those supported by the malo driver:

Card	Chip	Bus	Standard
Ambicom WL54CF	88W8385	PCMCIA	b/g
I-O DATA WN-G54/CF	88W8385	PCMCIA	b/g
Netgear WG511v2	88W8310	CardBus	b/g
Netgear WG311v3	88W8335	PCI	b/g
SparkLAN WCFM-100	88W8385	PCMCIA	b/g
Tenda TWL541C	88W8310	CardBus	b/g
Tenda TWL542P	88W8335	PCI	b/g

EXAMPLES

The following example scans for available networks:

# ifconfig malo0 scan

The following hostname.if(5) example configures malo0 to join network “mynwid”, using WPA key “mywpakey”, obtaining an IP address using DHCP:

nwid mynwid wpakey mywpakey
dhcp

HISTORY

The malo driver first appeared in OpenBSD 4.1.

AUTHORS

The malo driver was written by Claudio Jeker and Marcus Glocker.

CAVEATS

WPA encryption is not supported for PCMCIA devices.