I am not sure if this applies to any other broadcom cards.
but for myself and 2 of my friends who have BCM4313 all experience this problem
Note: this problem only occurs with the latest build of opensuse11.4, which i believe is the official version, as i upgraded from RC2 to the lastest packages already.
basically, as most of us know, kernel 2.6.37 comes with brcm40211 enabled for 4313 cards by default
Although this driver is open source, and is it also the prefered driver for 4313, it is simply not stable enough for day to day use
nowadays most laptops come with a hardware button to turn on/off wireless.
However, with brcm40211 enabled, me and my friends were not able to use the hardware switch
Even worse, our laptops become completely unresponsive when turned the switch off
And, when force restart, the system WONT even boot up into failsafe mode
I am not a linux expert nor are my friends, so we didnt figure out what exactly is wrong with it
However, we found out that by blacklisting brcm40211, and install the proprietary broadcom wl driver
the wireless works like a charm once again just like in previous opensuse versions.
Once again, this problem never occured back in RC2 and RC1
but started to happen only after updating to what i belive is the official version (which should be out as ISO in 7 hours
On 03/10/2011 01:06 AM, BeyondSora wrote:
>
> I am not sure if this applies to any other broadcom cards.
> but for myself and 2 of my friends who have BCM4313 all experience this
> problem
>
> Note: this problem only occurs with the latest build of opensuse11.4,
> which i believe is the official version, as i upgraded from RC2 to the
> lastest packages already.
>
> basically, as most of us know, kernel 2.6.37 comes with brcm40211
> enabled for 4313 cards by default
> Although this driver is open source, and is it also the prefered driver
> for 4313, it is simply not stable enough for day to day use
>
> nowadays most laptops come with a hardware button to turn on/off
> wireless.
> However, with brcm40211 enabled, me and my friends were not able to use
> the hardware switch
> Even worse, our laptops become completely unresponsive when turned the
> switch off
> And, when force restart, the system WONT even boot up into failsafe
> mode
>
> I am not a linux expert nor are my friends, so we didnt figure out what
> exactly is wrong with it
>
> However, we found out that by blacklisting brcm40211, and install the
> proprietary broadcom wl driver
> the wireless works like a charm once again just like in previous
> opensuse versions.
>
> Once again, this problem never occured back in RC2 and RC1
> but started to happen only after updating to what i belive is the
> official version (which should be out as ISO in 7 hours
Yes, the people that wrote brcm80211 managed to break it so that it kills the
system when started with the rfkill switch off.
Unfortunately, the only developers with the hardware are the people from
Broadcom, but that situation is being rectified. My hardware should arrive
within a week.
I’m glad that the wl driver works for you, but remember that the people that
coded wl are the ones writing brcm80211!!
yeah the broadcom wl driver works perfectly fine for me, and the indicator light above the hardware button functions properly too (White light for ON and yellow for OFF)
and I didnt know that its the same ppl who wrote wl that are writing brcm80211
Hope this bug gets fixed sooon, as i definitely prefer using an opensource driver over the proprietary wl one
but, if its the broadcom ppl writing this brcm80211 driver, which is opensource
does that mean Broadcom is finally opening up their wireless drivers for linux?
On 03/10/2011 04:36 PM, BeyondSora wrote:
>
> yeah the broadcom wl driver works perfectly fine for me, and the
> indicator light above the hardware button functions properly too (White
> light for ON and yellow for OFF)
>
> and I didnt know that its the same ppl who wrote wl that are writing
> brcm80211
> Hope this bug gets fixed sooon, as i definitely prefer using an
> opensource driver over the proprietary wl one
>
> but, if its the broadcom ppl writing this brcm80211 driver, which is
> opensource
> does that mean Broadcom is finally opening up their wireless drivers
> for linux?
Yes, but only in a limited way so fart. We will see what happens, but they still
refuse to license their firmware for redistribution. That is why the
install_bcm43xx_firmware script is needed.
I have exactly the same problem. After upgrading to 11.4 release from 11.4 rc2 the link to brcm80211 firmware was fixed in package kernel-firmware which reactivated the brcm80211 driver and caused my system into an unbootable state.
I worked around it by renaming the symlinks in /lib/firmware/brcm so loading the brcm80211 modules will fail and wl will jump in. You can do it in either runlevel 1, or after disabling the wireless module in the BIOS settings.
Actually I did that. The only difference is that I blacklisted brcm80211 in /etc/modprobe.d/50-broadcom-wl-blacklist.conf. And I commented blacklisting of b43 and the others. It causes that brcm80211 is not loaded anymore but b43 is still not loaded instead. Do you have the file 50-broadcom-wl-blacklist.conf in /etc/modprobe.d?
ah, I am not using b43 tho
The driver i have installed is broadcom wl
Have you tried broadcom wl? altho being proprietary, it has worked out quite well for me
Oh, sorry, you are right, I need broadcom wl too. I found out why wl is not loaded, I installed broadcom wl from Packman for the kernel 2.6.37.1 but I have 2.6.37.3 from Tumbleweed.
