NAME

upgt — Conexant/Intersil PrismGT SoftMAC USB IEEE 802.11b/g wireless network device

SYNOPSIS

upgt* at uhub? port ?

DESCRIPTION

The upgt driver supports the USB 2.0 Conexant/Intersil PrismGT series wireless adapters based on the GW3887 chipset.

These are the modes the upgt 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 upgt 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 upgt driver relies on the software 802.11 stack for both encryption and decryption of data frames.

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

FILES

The driver needs a firmware file which is loaded when an interface is brought up:

/libdata/firmware/upgt/upgt-gw3887

Currently these firmware files can not be included in NetBSD base system. Please download these files and put them into the above firmware directory.

A tar archive file that includes upgt-gw3887 firmware can be found at:

http://www.nazgul.ch/upgt/upgt-firmware-1.1.tar.gz

HARDWARE

The following adapters should work:

Belkin F5D7050 (version 1000)

Cohiba Proto Board

D-Link DWL-G120 Cohiba

D-Link DWL-G122 rev A2

FSC Connect2Air E-5400 USB D1700

Gigaset USB Adapter 54

Inventel UR045G

IOGear GWU513

Linksys WUSB54AG

Linksys WUSB54G ver 2

Medion MD40900

Philips CPWUA054

SMC EZ ConnectG SMC2862W-G

Sagem XG703A

Spinnaker DUT

Spinnaker Proto Board

Thomson SpeedTouch 121g

Willcom / Sharp WS003SH/WS004SH smart phone internal wireless LAN

EXAMPLES

The following ifconfig.if(5) example configures upgt0 to join whatever network is available on boot, using WEP key “0x1deadbeef1”, channel 11, obtaining an IP address using dhcpcd(8):

ssid 'my network' nwkey 0x1deadbeef1 chan 11 
dhcp

Join an existing BSS network, “my_net”:

# ifconfig upgt0 192.168.1.1 netmask 0xffffff00 nwid my_net

SEE ALSO

arp(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), usb(4), ifconfig.if(5), ifconfig(8)

HISTORY

The upgt driver first appeared in OpenBSD 4.3. It was ported to NetBSD by FUKAUMI Naoki and first appeared in NetBSD 6.0.

AUTHORS

The upgt driver was written by Marcus Glocker <mglocker@openbsd.org>.

The hardware specification was reverse engineered by the people at http://lekernel.net/prism54/.

BUGS

The upgt driver just supports the USB 2.0 devices (GW3887 chipset) but not the USB 1.0 devices containing the NET2280, ISL3880, and ISL3886 chipsets. Some further efforts would be necessary to add USB 1.0 support to the driver.