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AN(4) Device Drivers Manual AN(4)

an — Aironet Communications 4500/4800 wireless network adapter driver

To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:

device an
device wlan

Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):

if_an_load="YES"

The an driver provides support for Aironet Communications 4500 and 4800 wireless network adapters and variants, including the following:

Support for these devices include the ISA, PCI and PCMCIA varieties. The Aironet 4500 series adapters operate at 1 and 2Mbps while the Aironet 4800 series and Cisco adapters can operate at 1, 2, 5.5 and 11Mbps. The ISA, PCI and PCMCIA devices are all based on the same core PCMCIA modules and all have the same programming interface, however unlike the Lucent WaveLAN/IEEE cards, the ISA and PCI cards appear to the host as normal ISA and PCI devices and do not require any PCCARD support.

The PCMCIA Aironet cards require PC Card support, including the kernel pccard(4) driver. ISA cards can either be configured to use ISA Plug and Play or to use a particular I/O address and IRQ by properly setting the DIP switches on the board. (The default switch setting is for Plug and Play.) The an driver has Plug and Play support and will work in either configuration, however when using a hard-wired I/O address and IRQ, the driver configuration and the NIC's switch settings must agree. PCI cards require no switch settings of any kind and will be automatically probed and attached.

All host/device interaction with the Aironet cards is via programmed I/O. The Aironet devices support 802.11 and 802.3 frames, power management, BSS (infrastructure) and IBSS (ad-hoc) operation modes. The an driver encapsulates all IP and ARP traffic as 802.11 frames, however it can receive either 802.11 or 802.3 frames. Transmit speed is selectable between 1Mbps, 2Mbps, 5.5Mbps, 11Mbps or "auto" (the NIC automatically chooses the best speed).

By default, the an driver configures the Aironet card for infrastructure operation.

For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8).

an%d: init failed
The Aironet card failed to become ready after an initialization command was issued.
an%d: failed to allocate %d bytes on NIC
The driver was unable to allocate memory for transmit frames in the NIC's on-board RAM.
an%d: device timeout
The Aironet card failed to generate an interrupt to acknowledge a transmit command.

altq(4), arp(4), miibus(4), netintro(4), wlan(4), ancontrol(8), ifconfig(8)

The an device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 4.0.

The an driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul@ee.columbia.edu>.

July 16, 2005 FreeBSD-12.0