Yet Another Broadcom 43xx Wireless Thread [4321]

English Network/Internet
1

Hello all. I have a BCM4321 based card. I have been reading these forums and material online regarding the installation of drivers to correctly interface with my wireless card but i have been unable to do so as of yet. I will detail what I done below (at least, what i remember of it).

First of all here is some information about my specific installation;

dmesg | grep b43

    7.687349] b43-pci-bridge 0000:0b:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
    7.687368] b43-pci-bridge 0000:0b:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
    7.901557] b43-phy0: Broadcom 4321 WLAN found (core revision 12)
    7.917261] b43-phy0 ERROR: FOUND UNSUPPORTED PHY (Analog 5, Type 4, Revision 2)
    7.917306] b43: probe of ssb0:0 failed with error -95


lspci -nnv

0b:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4321 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4328] (rev 05)
        Subsystem: Apple Computer Inc. Device [106b:008c]
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
        Memory at 97300000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [58] Vendor Specific Information: Len=78 <?>
        Capabilities: [e8] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        Capabilities: [d0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
        Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
        Capabilities: [13c] Virtual Channel
        Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number 74-d2-5b-ff-ff-ca-00-1f
        Capabilities: [16c] Power Budgeting <?>
        Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge

It may be obvious but the interface does not show up in ifconfig.

/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware did not seem to have any noticeable effect if i recall correctly.

I was able to find the broadcom-wl package online (zypper was unable to find it in the packman repository for some reason), but the installation process notified me at one point that some material relating to the kernel was not present and so might break the installation. However,

zypper se -i broad

Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...

S | Name                    | Summary                                           | Type   
--+-------------------------+---------------------------------------------------+--------
i | broadcom-wl             | Wireless driver for Broadcom 43xx series of chips | package
i | broadcom-wl-kmp-desktop | Wireless driver for Broadcom 43xx series of chips | package

Evidently something was installed. (I was in a completely different state of mind when i did this, unfortunately, so i’m not sure exactly what happened).

I decided to try installing the ‘hybrid’ driver available from Broadcom.com - 802.11 Linux STA driver. make yielded the following output

KBUILD_NOPEDANTIC=1 make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
make: *** /lib/modules/2.6.37.1-1.2-desktop/build: No such file or directory.  Stop.
make: *** [all] Error 2

From what I read online this was apparently due to not having ‘kernel headers’. I subsequently installed several packages, including kernel-devel, kernel-source, kernel-syms, glibc-devel, and linux-glibc-devel, because i had deduced their association with this ‘kernel headers’ phenomenon from various forum posts. (Needless to say I am not experienced at this level of abstraction.) Of course none of these things populated /lib/modules/uname -r/ with a build directory, which is what i would need to install the hybrid driver.

Here’s some more data.

zypper lr | grep pack

3 | packman                          | packman                          | Yes     | Yes     |   99     | http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/11.3/                     
4 | packman-essentials               | packman-essentials               | Yes     | Yes     |   99     | http://packman.inode.at/suse/Factory/Essentials

uname -a

Linux tmbp 2.6.37.1-1.2-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT 2011-02-21 10:34:10 +0100 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I am using KDE and I believe this is openSUSE 11.4.

Thanks for any help.[/size]

2

if an administrator moved this to the wireless forum, it would likely get valuable responses

3

Ah how silly of me. I had not seen the wireless forum. Can I not move it?

4

You need to get this machine hardwired so you can update the system. Your kernel is old and does not/will not match the packman broadcom versions.

BUT and it’s big!
You have the wrong packman repos.

Please post us the result of

zypper lr -d

It looks like you have 11.3 repos

There is a guide on broadcom here
Install Broadcom Drivers from Packman

So - all you need to do
Remove any 11.3 repos
Update the system

su -
zypper up

reboot
add the correct packman repos (Or you could just click on this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10573557/one_click_mmedia/11.4-codecs.ymp )
Update the system again
reboot

5

Thanks for the help! This has definitely fixed something, as eth1 now appears in ifconfig’s output. It seems fully configured and ready to go;

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1F:5B:CA:74:D2  
          inet addr:192.168.1.120  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21f:5bff:feca:74d2/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:304 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:8004
          TX packets:18 errors:14 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:22412 (21.8 Kb)  TX bytes:3679 (3.5 Kb)
          Interrupt:16

However, I’m not able to get online at all, and I’m pretty sure I configured everything correctly in the Wireless Settings area. Strangely enough, if i try to ping 192.168.1.254, I get intermittent Destination Host Unreachable messages from 192.168.1.97, the address listed for the wired interface that isn’t even plugged in. arp -a yields an incomplete entry for 192.168.1.254, and pinging 192.168.1.255 yields nothing. However at this point it seems to be a much more superficial problem, so thanks for getting the driver working (and for all the extra software in that package-thing ;). What might I do from here to get this all working smoothly?

6

Is it just the wireless that doesn’t get online?

7

Yep, just the wireless. I haven’t yet tried using both at the same time, though; I’ve either been using wired and posting on here or unplugging wired to test out the wireless etc. Wireless comes up on the ‘Network Settings’ application fine, it seems: it actually says BCM4328 802.11a/b/g/n. Not sure if this distinction between 4328 and 4321 is significant.

But yeah i’m able to set it up fine and everything, but then i can’t really ‘do’ anything, including ping as outlined above or any DNS queries, etc.

Strangely, I just noticed that tcpdump is now showing traffic normally on eth1. There’s a little bit of random IP traffic within the lan, but it’s mostly ARP. The problems I mentioned before are still there, though. (nslookup & ping fail, etc)

8

You can see your device in the list here
b43 - Linux Wireless

wl is the right choice.

Can you login to your router/access point?

Have a check thru this
Getting Your Wireless to Work

9

Sorry for the delay. I cannot in fact ping or access anything, including the access point. However I will unfortunately have to delay further a methodical investigation as something quite extraordinary has occurred in my reality that must be attended to. Thank you for your patience caf4926 and I will return hopefully shortly after having fully taken to use the information in your post.