NAME
malo —
Marvell Libertas IEEE 802.11b/g
wireless network device
SYNOPSIS
malo* at pci?
DESCRIPTION
The
malo driver provides support for Marvell Libertas
88W8335/88W8310/88W8385 based PCI 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 de
facto 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
ifconfig.if(5).
FILES
The driver needs a set of firmware files which are loaded when an interface is
brought up:
- /libdata/firmware/malo/malo8335-h
-
- /libdata/firmware/malo/malo8335-m
-
- /libdata/firmware/malo/malo8338
-
- /libdata/firmware/malo/malo8385-h
-
- /libdata/firmware/malo/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, designed to be used with
pkg_add(1), can be found at:
http://www.nazgul.ch/malo/malo-firmware-1.4.tgz
HARDWARE
The following cards are among those supported by the
malo
driver:
Card |
Chip |
Bus |
Standard |
Netgear WG311v3 |
88W8335 |
PCI |
b/g |
Tenda TWL542P |
88W8335 |
PCI |
b/g |
EXAMPLES
The following
ifconfig.if(5)
example configures malo0 to join whatever network is available on boot, using
WEP key “0x1deadbeef1”, channel 11, obtaining an IP address using
DHCP:
dhcp NONE NONE NONE nwkey 0x1deadbeef1 chan 11
Join an existing BSS network, “my_net”:
# ifconfig malo0 192.168.1.1 netmask 0xffffff00 nwid my_net
NOTES
Contrary to the driver on
OpenBSD, this driver currently
does not work on PCMCIA/CARDBUS.
SEE ALSO
arp(4),
ifmedia(4),
intro(4),
netintro(4),
pci(4),
ifconfig.if(5),
hostapd(8),
ifconfig(8)
AUTHORS
The
malo driver was first written by
Claudio
Jeker
<
claudio@openbsd.org>
and
Marcus Glocker
<
mglocker@openbsd.org>
and appeared first in
OpenBSD 4.1.
NetBSD porting was done by
Arnaud
Degroote
<
degroote@NetBSD.org>.