From owner-freebsd-mobile Wed May 19 12:56: 9 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Received: from dominator.eecs.harvard.edu (dominator.eecs.harvard.edu [140.247.60.28]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 87C5914E11 for ; Wed, 19 May 1999 12:56:03 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from karp@eecs.harvard.edu) Received: (from karp@localhost) by dominator.eecs.harvard.edu (8.9.3/8.6.12) id PAA02729; Wed, 19 May 1999 15:56:03 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 15:56:03 -0400 (EDT) From: Brad Karp Message-Id: <199905191956.PAA02729@dominator.eecs.harvard.edu> To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: wi driver and WaveLAN IEEE 802.11 Turbo cards Cc: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I've just verified that the wi driver (for Lucent WaveLAN IEEE 802.11 cards) works fine with the WaveLAN Turbo cards, which offer (according to Lucent) three times the throughput of the non-Turbo cards. The Hermes interface (CPU side of the card) appears identical, so no driver changes are necessary. What a pleasant surprise that a card manufacturer has improved performance without requiring a single line of new code from driver authors. A wider range of transmit rate values make sense for the Turbo cards. The values for Turbo cards are: 1 - Fixed Low 2 - Fixed Standard 3 - Auto Rate Select (High) 4 - Fixed Medium 5 - Fixed High 6 - Auto Rate Select (Standard) 7 - Auto Rate Select (Medium) The old cards did "Low" (1 Mbps link) and "Standard" (2 Mbps link). The newer cards add "Medium" and "High", where "High" is purported to be three times faster than Standard. I'm not sure if that means the _link_ bitrate is 6 Mbps, or if Lucent's statement pertains to an end-to-end (application- level) measurement, taking into account MAC behavior, &c. Note that the choice of 3 for auto rate select, with a maximum of High, means that drivers for older, 2 Mbps cards will get the higher bitrate behavior when the link is good enough, if they defaulted to auto rate selection (also 3) between Low and Standard with the non-Turbo cards. (These values are supplied to wicontrol's -t option.) Bill Paul: you might want to add values 4-7 to the wicontrol man page when you've time. -Brad, karp@eecs.harvard.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message