The following is the list of features supported by WiLink8 driver and device.

• 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

For specific features and bug fixes updated in R8.8, see the WiLink8 R8.8 Release Notes . Additionally, WiLink™ 8 WLAN Features User's Guide provides complete details of the WiLink8 supported features.

WL18xx Linux driver uses the open source components along with interface driver for the device to realize Wi-Fi functionalities. Figure 2-1 shows the high level driver partitioning and architecture.

The section below briefs the high-level components in the driver layers and their functionality.

• WiLink8 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 Driver 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 devices, supporting mac80211 operations. Contains the common functions for all supported WiLink 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 driver.
• MAC Driver 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. 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.

The following section details the integration of the driver to the Linux SDK platform. The references and instructions provided are applicable to any platform using Linux operating system. However specific instructions mentioned below are based on PROCESSOR-SDK-LINUX-AM335X 06_00_00_07. For WiLink8 hardware integration, see the WiLink™ Module Hardware Integration Guide.

The generic steps to integrate the WiLink8 R8.8 driver release manually to any kernel are provided below. The same method can be used for upgrading the WiLink8 driver version of an existing SDK to R8.8 release. However if TI SDK is used (with pre-built kernel) along with “build utilities” scripts can be used. Note that the following steps assume Linux host environment up and running. For more information on setting up your Linux host PC, follow the instructions provided in Processor SDK Getting Started Guide.

1. Download the Kernel (4.19+) and platform SDK.
2. Install the SDK image to SD card as per the SDK installation instructions.
3. Configure Kernel using verify_kernel.sh utility or manually.
4. Apply kernel patches – this needs to be done if building the kernel for the first time.
5. Build WLAN modules, kernel zImage (optional), kernel modules (build-utilities) and BeagleBone Black DTB.
6. Compile the device tree files for specific boards (dts → dtb) and update.
7. Copy the build outputs to SD card.

Steps 1 and 2 are manual. This is the starting step irrespective of the SDK used. These steps will ensure that default file system provided by the SDK is installed into the SD card. Since as part of the R8.8 WiLink8 WLAN driver build only a subset of components related to the WLAN and the kernel and modules are built, it is important to have the complete default file system installed.

Steps 3, 4 and 6 (except for step -5, DTS/B file) can be performed using the “build_scripts” utility. The DTS/B file is hardware specific and needs to be created based on the hardware design.