| AWI(4) | Device Drivers Manual | AWI(4) | 
awi —
awi* at pcmcia? function ?
awi driver supports various IEEE 802.11 wireless
  cards that run AMD PCnetMobile firmware based on the AMD 79c930 controller
  with the Intersil (formerly Harris) PRISM radio chipset. It provides access to
  32kb of memory shared between the controller and the host. All host/device
  interaction is accomplished via this shared memory, which can be accessed
  either via PCMCIA or I/O memory spaces. The awi driver
  encapsulates all IP and ARP traffic in 802.11 frames.
The driver works both in infrastructure mode and in ad-hoc (independent BSS) mode.
In infrastructure mode, it communicates with an Access Point, which serves as a link-layer bridge between an Ethernet segment and the wireless network. An access point also provides roaming capability, which allows a wireless node to move between access points.
In ad-hoc mode, the device communicates peer to peer. Although it is more efficient to communicate between wireless nodes, the coverage is limited spatially due to the lack of roaming capability.
In addition to these two modes in the IEEE 802.11 specification,
    the awi driver also supports a variant of ad-hoc
    mode outside of the spec for DS radio cards. This makes it possible to
    communicate with the WaveLAN ad-hoc mode of
    wi(4) driver. The NWID has no
    effect in this mode.
Another mode added to the awi driver can
    be used with old Melco access points with 2Mbps cards. This mode actually
    uses the IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc mode with encapsulation of raw Ethernet packets
    (including headers) in 802.11 frames.
For more information on configuring this device, see ifconfig(8) and ifmedia(4).
awi driver include:
The original Xircom Netwave AirSurfer is supported by the cnw(4) driver, and the PRISM-II cards are supported by the wi(4) driver.
Am79C930 PCnet Mobile Single-Chip Wireless LAN Media Access Controller, http://www.amd.com.
awi device driver first appeared in
  NetBSD 1.5.
awi driver was written by
  Bill Sommerfeld ⟨sommerfeld@NetBSD.org⟩.
  It was then completely rewritten to support cards with the DS phy and ad-hoc
  mode by
| January 2, 2006 | NetBSD 10.1 |