WiLink™ 8 Wi-Fi Driver for Linux OS
WILINK8-WIFI-NLCP
This product has been released to the market and is available for purchase. For some products, newer alternatives may be available.
This product has been released to the market and is available for purchase. For some products, newer alternatives may be available.
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Part Number | Buy from Texas Instruments or Third Party | Alert Me | Status | Current Version | Version Date | OS | Host |
WILINK8-WIFI-NLCP: |
Free |
ACTIVE | R8.8 | 08-OCT-2020 | Linux | AM335/AM437/Other | |
WILINK8-WIFI-WTS: |
|
ACTIVE | v9.1.0 | 18-MAR-2016 | Linux | AM335/AM437/Other |
Description
WiLink™ 8 NLCP package consists of build scripts to update WiLink™ 8 Linux driver, firmware binary, wpa supplicant, hostapd etc. For more details please refer to the release notes and user’s guide
Software block overview:
WL18xx Linux driver uses the open source components along with the interface driver for the device to realize Wi-Fi functionalities. Listing few NLCP driver package components below:
- WiLink™ 8 FW: The FW runs on the device HW to provide the PHY and MAC functionality of the Wi-Fi. The host communicates via SDIO to the WLAN device. On the device side, the WLAN MAC is responsible for the 802.11 MAC functions, and conveys WLAN packets from/to the external host to/from the FW. The MAC is responsible for the timing and the time critical decisions only. The PHY performs the 802.11 PHY functions of encoding/decoding and modulation/ demodulation, and is responsible for the RF functions of up/down modulation to carrier frequency, filtering and amplification.
- WiLink™ 8 Driver: It is an abstraction layer to the device HW and FW. Implements low level operations required to support the MAC driver.
- wlcore: Implements the low level driver for WiLink™ 8 devices, supporting mac80211 operations. Contains the common functions for all supported WiLink™ 8 chipsets.
- Wl18xx: Implement chip specific functions and services. Supports the wlcore by implementing HW-specific functions.
- wlcore_sdio: Adaptation layer between the SDIO driver and the WiLink™ 8 driver.
- MAC Driver: It implements layer-2 Wi-Fi protocol requirements (data and control path). This is a generic component, not platform/device specific. This layer consists of the following components.
- nl80211: Implements a net-link interface between user-space and kernel space components of the Linux Wireless solution.
- cfg80211: The Linux wireless configuration API. (This is the lowest layer that is common for both soft-MAC and hard-MAC).
- mac80211: The Linux kernel module implementing MAC-layer functions for Wi-Fi Soft-MAC solution.
- Hostap package: Contains open-source user-space package (BSD license). Provides the upper-management layers for all WLAN roles (STA, AP, P2P and Mesh). Generates 2 daemons: wpa_supplicant (STA, P2P, Mesh), and hostapd (AP).
- Utilities: provide initialization and configuration services. Implement debug and statistics capabilities
Features
- Linux open-source Wi-Fi package.
- TI NLCP releases are Wi-Fi Alliance pre-certified.
- IEEE: 802.11 a,b,g,n, 2X2 MIMO @ 2.4 GHz and antenna diversity @ 5 GHz
- Supported Modes: STA, AP, P2P, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Mesh
- Up to 100 Mbps UDP throughput
- Security: WPA3, WMM-PS, WMM-AC, WPA/2PSK, Ent,WPS,WPSv2
- Low power support: Station WoW & Suspend/Resume , AP ELP (800 μA idle connect)
- Co-existence with other 2.4 GHz protocol: BT/BLE and TI ZigBee at 2.4 GHz
- AP DFS, radar detection at 5 GHz
- Multi Role Multi Channel: concurrent operation of 2 WLAN roles on a single device.
- Wi-Fi over mesh support: open 802.11s