NOTE: this page is for archival only, see the note at the end of the page.

Orinoco

This FullMAC driver covers a range of older wireless cards which have varying capabilities. All the cards share a common MAC controller. They may differ by firmware (supplied by Agere, Intersil or Symbol) and bus connection.

caveats

WPA support is only available for Agere based cards, and requires a firmware download on startup.

Monitor mode may only be stable with certain firmware revisions.

supported chips

All the firmware variants are supported, though not all features may be available.

The Hermes I MAC controller is supported. The more recent Hermes II MAC controller is not supported.

Support for USB variants is only available in a fork of the main driver.

available devices

TODO:link to a device list

features

working

  • Station mode
  • Ad-hoc mode
  • Monitor mode
  • WEP
  • WPA-PSK (TKIP)

not working yet

  • USB based cards
  • AP mode
  • Radiotap headers in monitor mode

not supported

  • WPA2
  • WPA-PSK (CCMP)

device firmware

The driver will do its best to work with the firmware it finds on the card. This may restrict the capabilities of the card.

Firmware download to RAM is available for Symbol based spectrum_cs cards, and all Agere cards.

The spectrum_cs cards require two firmware files, symbol_sp24t_prim_fw and symbol_sp24t_sec_fw. Extraction tools (for windows drivers) can be found in orinoco-fwutils

The Agere firmware file must be named agere_sta_fw.bin. Extraction tools (for windows drivers) can be found at TODO:xxxx. WPA support requires at least firmware v9.42. v9.48 is available for download at TODO:xxxx

external links


This is a static dump of the old wiki, taken after locking it in January 2015. The new wiki is at https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/.
versions of this page: last, v19, v18, v17, v16, v15, v14, v13, v12, v11, v10, v9, v8, v7, v6, v5, v4, v3, v2, v1