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MALO(4) Device Drivers Manual MALO(4)

malo — Marvell Libertas IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device

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

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 (WPA1 and WPA2). WPA2 is the current encryption standard for wireless networks. It is strongly recommended that neither WEP nor WPA1 are used as the sole mechanism to secure wireless communication, due to serious weaknesses. WPA1 is disabled by default and may be enabled using the option "wpaprotos wpa1,wpa2". For standard WPA networks which use pre-shared keys (PSK), keys are configured using the "wpakey" option. WPA-Enterprise networks require use of the wpa_supplicant package. 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).

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).

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

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

arp(4), cardbus(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pci(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)

The malo driver first appeared in OpenBSD 4.1.

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

WPA encryption is not supported for PCMCIA devices.

This driver does not support powersave mode.

November 10, 2019 OpenBSD-current