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

The Prism54.org domain redirects here. The old website and drivers are archived at http://lekernel.net/prism54/.

p54

p54 is a driver for Intersil's Prism54 chips series. It supports both older full-MAC devices (with new soft-MAC firmware) and newer soft-MAC devices. It is included in the Linux kernel.

caveats

Before you can use the hardware, you have to get the the right firmware.

supported chips

  • ISL3877, ISL3880, ISL3890 and ISL3886 (miniPCI)
  • ISL3886 + net2280 (USB, 1st generation with net2280 usb<->pci bridge)

  • ISL3887 (USB, 2nd generation, native USB interface)

available devices

For a complete listing of supported products, see the device list.

firmware

There are several different firmwares for different hardware. so you have to pick the right one, download, rename to the listed name and put it into the right place... Normally this should be /lib/firmware. However some distributions put firmware in a different place.

please pick the right one for your device from the lists:

  • for 2.6.28 kernels and beyond:

  • only for kernels older than 2.6.28:

    • card type

      required filename

      firmware

      miniPCI / PCMCIA

      isl3886

      download

      USB 1st generation (ISL3886 + net2280)

      isl3890usb

      download

      USB 2nd generation (ISL3887)

      isl3887usb_bare

      download

      Note: These firmwares are kept for backward compatibility reasons only!

  • Alternatively, firmware can be extracted from windows drivers with a tool called "fwextract3" available from http://lekernel.net/prism54/misc.html.

working

  • Ad-Hoc, AP, Mesh, Monitor and Station Mode
  • WMM/WME/802.11e (QoS)
  • TPC and ERP
  • Cryptographic accelerator for WEP, TKIP and CCMP
  • Packet Injection in Monitor Mode
  • power save management in station mode
  • Supported band table (by radio chip):
    • ID

      Chip name

      802.11 b/g

      802.11 a

      1

      Duette3

      ?

      ?

      2

      Duette2

      ?

      ?

      3

      Frisbee

      yes

      no

      4

      Crossbow

      yes

      yes

      5

      Longbow

      ?

      ?

not working yet

  • regulatory domain codes
  • LED class driver
  • Firmware scanning
  • DFS / Radar Detection
  • NITRO (Burst, Compression, Aggregation)
  • LowerMAC Terminal
  • STMicroelectronics' stlc45xx (for Nokia's N810)

Enabling p54

To enable p54, you must first enable mac80211:

Networking  --->
  Wireless  --->
    <M> Improved wireless configuration API
    <M> Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack (mac80211)

You can then enable p54 in the kernel configuration under

Device Drivers  --->
  [*] Network device support  --->
        Wireless LAN --->
          [*] Wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11)
          <M>   Softmac Prism54 support
          <M>     Prism54 USB support
          <M>     Prism54 PCI support

Contact

  • IRC: #prism54 on freenode (#p54u is about a different driver for BSD)

  • no special mailing list, use the linux wireless list for development issues


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/.
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