SANA-II Networking Standard

The established standard for Amiga networking devices is SANA-II Release 2 (S2R2), as specified by Commodore. The "R2" matters — it is the current, relevant revision. The full specification ships on the CD in the sana2_v2.lha archive (Extras/Networking/SANA-II/); Amiga Technologies chose to leave that archive "as is."

The two R2 clarifications

The CD note (DevInfo/Networking/Networking) clarifies two R2 features that caused confusion:

Packet filtering

Under the original SANA-II standard, a protocol stack opened a device and asked for certain packet types, receiving every packet matching that type. That was wasteful: packets the stack would never use still went through its read path and burned CPU. R2 introduces a filtering tag so that easily-identifiable useless packets can be rejected on arrival instead of in the stack.

Multiple Protocol Stack Support

Each opener gets all the packets it needs. If one incoming packet satisfies requests from more than one opener, every matching opener gets a copy of that packet.

Why this is the standard

The new style device query mechanism (NSDEVTYPE_SANA2, type 7 — "a >=SANA2R2 networking device") references S2R2's S2_DEVICEQUERY as its model; the general NSCMD_DEVICEQUERY design is intentionally similar. SANA-II is therefore the canonical way to write or talk to an Amiga networking device, and a SANA2 device is the device type the OS itself recognises in the new style device taxonomy.

See Also

Sources: Heinz Wrobel, Amiga Technologies, "Networking" (1996). Raw: raw/networking/sana2-networking.md Updated: 2026-08-04