server install iso and netboot pxe hang in ethdetect

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

I am trying to install Ubuntu 13.10 amd64 through my pxe server with the regular ubuntu netboot release. While this works on some of my machines, I experienced another problem.

When booting an Acer Aspire One 756 (Broadcom BCM4313 802.11bgn WLAN adapter), the installation process hangs in a very early state, right after detecting the keyboard type.

The machine is still running, you can login through a second console. The problem is that it hangs within

udpkg --configure --force-configure ethdetect
/bin/sh /bin/ethdetect
/bin/sh /bin/check-missing-firmware p2p1 wlan0
ip link set p2p1 up

or similiar with wlan0 instead of p2p1. The ip link command can't even be killed with kill -9

So it's definitely that ethdetect hangs wich this particular wlan chip.

Didn't find a workaround yet.

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

btw., dmesg says

ieee80211 phy0: brcmsmac: fail to load firmware brcm/bcm43xx-0.fw

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

The 13.10 server install image has the same problem...

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

This drives me into trouble since the regular desktop installer works on that machine, but does not support installation with LVM inside of luks encrypted volumes...

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

Found a workaround:

give as additional boot parameter

modprobe.blacklist=brcmsmac

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

The problem is that the installation environment comes with the kernel driver for the broadcom chip, but not with the firmware. It thus creates an existing, but non-working device, which causes ethdetect and ip to hang forever.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Ryan Beisner (1chb1n)]

Hardware = Dell Latitude E5430 with BCM Eth & Wireless.

The 13.10 Server installer hangs on the purple text screen. Switching to console 2 and inspecting syslog reveals failure to load bcm wireless firmware.

Disabling Wireless device in BIOS during prior to installation was what I did. Blacklisting the brcmsmac should do the trick too.

I believe this model of laptop IS on the Ubuntu certification list, so this probably merits a little heat.