Hardy: b43 driver not working (Upgrade from Gutsy)

[ErikH]

I'm using an Acer Extensa 5220 laptop which includes a WLAN chipset
from Broadcom (BCM94311MCG). (for lspci details see Bug 184944)

The chipset (sometimes) worked with Gutsy (7.10) using bcm43xx drivers (mapped to eth1).
The chipset works with Fedora Core 8 (current kernel 2.6.23.9-85) using b43 driver (mapped to wlan0).
(As far as I understood b43 is replacing bcm43xx).

The first strange thing is that Hardy loads both drivers in parallel:
user@acer5220:~$ lsmod | grep -e b43 -e bcm
b43 112032 0
rfkill 8080 8 rfkill_input,b43
mac80211 163352 1 b43
input_polldev 5896 1 b43
bcm43xx 127720 0
ieee80211softmac 30848 1 bcm43xx
ieee80211 35528 2 bcm43xx,ieee80211softmac
ssb 32260 2 b43,ohci_hcd

But only b43 seems to care about the chipset and bcm43 seems to do nothing.
So I blacklisted bcm43xx to be sure it doesn't interfere with b43.
But without success.

The wlan device should be mapped to eth1 according to /etc/udev/rules.d/*, but it isn't:
user@acer5220:~$ grep eth1 /etc/udev/rules.d/*
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules:SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="MYMAC", NAME="eth1"

After a "modprobe b43" I can see two new devices are created instead of one, eth1 and wlan0_rename:

user@acer5220:~$ iwconfig

lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
irda0 no wireless extensions.
eth1 no wireless extensions.

wlan0_rename IEEE 802.11g ESSID:""
          Mode:Managed Channel:0 Access Point: Not-Associated
          Tx-Power=0 dBm
          Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B
          Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

When running ifconfig I can see that both are mapped to the same MAC but eth1 looks funny:

eth1 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr MYMAC-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
          BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

wlan0_rename Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr MYMAC
          BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

The settings for ESSID and KEY from /etc/network/interfaces set for
device eth1 are not used. If I set them for wlan0_rename
manually using "iwconfig" I still get no connection to my access point.

(Renaming eth1 to wlan0 in config files partly worked but I ended up
 with a new device wmaster0_rename that looks exactly like eth1 here.)

After a rmmod/modprobe b43 cycle I can see the following dmesg output
[ 2412.739336] b43-phy1: Broadcom 4311 WLAN found
[ 2412.816115] phy1: Selected rate control algorithm 'simple'
[ 2412.819356] udev: renamed network interface wmaster0 to eth1

What else can I try?

[steve. (launchpad-coles)]

Support for this has gone backwards for some of us.
For me this started to work easily with restricted drivers in Feisty.
It still worked in Feisty upgraded to Gutsy but won't work in a fresh install of Gutsy or the latest Hardy.
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01)

Hardware: Lenovo 3000 C200
None of the other workarounds work on my system, ndiswrapper b43 etc.

[mattsteven (matthew-matts)]

The PCMCIA card in my notebook also does not work with B43. After using the b43-fwcutter to get the right firmwares there are many "wlan0: link is not ready" and "ERROR: PHY transmission error" in the dmesg.

Also "wmaster0: unknown hardware address type 801"

lspci reports this as a BCM4318 AirForce One 54g 802.11g rev 2

I can't easily copy/paste in a report since I can't get this thing on the net.

[Baronek (baronek1)]

I can confirm that bug on on nx6125 with BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

Interface does show up as wlan0_rename
But the LED on notebook is not active and that means the card is not working/not turned on. I was unable to get it working. Ndiswrapper and bcm43xx works (well kind of a, sometimes there are glitches so I was looking for new driver as hope)

[ehcpdeveloper (ehcpdeveloper)]

using hardy alpha 4,
my bcm43 wireless worked with:

aptitude install b43-fwcutter

it downloaded and installed necessary files...

my lspci:
bvidinli2@bvidinli-laptop:~/Belgeler/diger$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 01)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M56P [Radeon Mobility X1600]
02:06.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller
02:06.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCIxx12 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
02:06.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD)
02:06.3 SD Host controller: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 SDA Standard Compliant SD Host Controller
02:06.4 Communication controller: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 GemCore based SmartCard controller
08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5753M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 21)
10:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01)
bvidinli2@bvidinli-laptop:~/Belgeler/diger$

[djtm (djtm)]

Using gutsy with vanilla 2.6.24.0 kernel, but also wlan0_rename and not working.

Also recently I get many kernel OOPS.

[djtm (djtm)]

Sorry, I meant to say that I get warnings of the b43 drivers dma handling, but just have a look at the attachment.
It's the vanilla kernel though, so not (yet) a Ubuntu problem.

[Jaap Haitsma (jaap)]

It works for me after installing b43-fwcutter

I see two minor errors though:

1) The wifi LED of my Latitude D410 does not light up when wifi is active
2) The connection speed information that network manager shows is incorrect. Yesterday it said I was connected with 1Mbit/s while I was able to get speeds upto 1MByte/s

[Baronek (baronek1)]

it was not working with hardy kernel on gutsy but
on clean install of alpha 4 it worked after installing b43 fwcutter.

[ErikH (erik-heckers)]

When installing b43-fwcutter a script is running that tries to download and install firmware.
(start debugging at /var/lib/dpkg/info/b43-fwcutter.postinst)
I (re-)installed the firmware but the problem is still the same.

New findings:
I see the access point (and some more) with good link
quality using
user@acer5220:~$ sudo iwlist wlan0_rename scanning
but with iwconfig I always see link quality is 0 and no working connection
is established. Independent of all the tricks I try the output in dmesg is always:
[ timestamp ] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0_rename: link is not ready.

[Jaap Haitsma (jaap)]

After the latest updates of today my wifi led is also burning. The b43 driver works very well for me now.

[logari81 (logari81)]

My lspci output for my wifi-card is the following:

02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

On a fresh installation of Hardy Alpha4 on my Asus laptop + full update up to date + b43-fwcutter from restricted drivers manager, network manager doesnt show me any wireless networks at all.

iwconfig tells me that my wireless card is mapped to wlan0

Following, a part of lshw output:
           *-network:1
                description: Network controller
                product: BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller
                vendor: Broadcom Corporation
                physical id: 3
                bus info: pci@0000:02:03.0
                version: 02
                width: 32 bits
                clock: 33MHz
                capabilities: bus_master
                configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=64 module=ssb
  *-network DISABLED
       description: Wireless interface
       physical id: 1
       logical name: wlan0
       serial: ********************
       capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
       configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11g

[naught101 (naught101)]

My BCM4306 rev 3 is not working with either bcm43xx (including unblacklisting), or bcm (using jockey-kde, which isn't installed by default, oddly). I can't install b43-legacy from source (seems like it should work from the site, I get a string of errors so big when I try to make it that I can't see the first error...

It would be good if b43-legacy was provided as a package.

jaap: what card is yours, and what revision? my computer is also a dell d410, wondering if it might be the same...

[Gert Kulyk (gkulyk)]

@naugth101:
Why b43legacy should be a seperate package? It is included in linux-image-2.6.24 as a module, you should not try to compile the linuxwireless.org driver util you know what you're doing. If you want to give bcm43xx another try you'll need to blacklist b43 and unblacklist bcm43xx.

Make sure you have b43-fwcutter (bcm43-fwcutter if you want to use bcm43xx-driver) installed and get the appropriate firmware for the 2.6.24 kernel-versions of the drivers. Again, for b43legacy you'll need firmware v3!

[Gert Kulyk (gkulyk)]

@naught101: [Update]

OK, because I'm not using ubuntu b43-fwcutter-package, I did not recognize that it is a bit outdated. It should extract firmware to the right place (both for b43legacy and b43, e.g. manually running /usr/share/b43-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh as root), which should result in two folders in /lib/firmware: b43 and b43legacy. The only thing is, that the version in hardy is 008 while actually 011 is up-to-date. Because the upstream-package does not include any changelog, I can't say if this is related. Debian has a newer version of b43-fwcutter package, where a changelog entry states:

 b43-fwcutter (1:010-2) unstable; urgency=low

   * Brown paper bag release.
   * get right firmware for 2.6.24(-rc)

 -- Rene Engelhard <email address hidden> Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:48:44 +0100

Maybe that's related. You should not need to worry about the b43(legacy) driver, in general the right driver is chosen by the kernel automatically.

[logari81 (logari81)]

Nice!!
Manually running /usr/share/b43-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh brought my bcm4318 wireless to life.
I would only like to try it on an adhoc network also, which was my motivation to give this alpha release a try (bcm43xx driver from gutsy did not support adhoc networks).

[Scott (s-drinkwater)]

Nice!! Also manually running sudo /usr/share/b43-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh fixed my wireless as well :-))

[naught101 (naught101)]

seems to be working for me after installing debian 0.10 of b43 (slow to
start up though, but that's ok).

cheers
ned

[naught101 (naught101)]

Ok, wireless light comes on, and networks are detected, but I haven't been able to connect yet,

1. knetworkmanager doesn't recognise the device (vendor and chipset are both "unknown")
2. can turn wireless OFF with software, but not on. Can turn on with fn+f2.
3. can not in any way turn wireless back on after hibernate.

perhaps this is a separate bug, I might try upgrading to the 011 driver if I can

[darthkhamul (emmanuel-strobbe)]

driver is correctly installed and detect my networks. But it seems the performances are really bads. up to 5 meters from my wifi router is it ok. But at about 10meter i can only use a 40kb/s bandwith. I tried the same driver on fedora 8 and it works perfectly.

[Harald Höller (harald-hoeller)]

i experience similar problems having a BCM4312 card but none of the above suggested solutions resolves my problem.

harold@buckeliger:~$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.

harold@buckeliger:~$ dmesg | grep b43
[ 48.824793] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_device_is_enabled
[ 48.824800] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_device_is_enabled
[ 48.824943] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_pcicore_dev_irqvecs_enable
[ 48.824946] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_pcicore_dev_irqvecs_enable
...

[logari81 (logari81)]

I would like to remind ... a few posts ago I said that I had to run: /usr/share/b43-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh
in order to get my bcm4318 work. Unfortunately after upgrading to alpha6 I had to reexecute this script in order to have wireless again. I suppose, the Restricted Drivers Manager should learn to invoke this script ... or whatever ... after downloading the firmware. I hope it will be ok in the final release.

[Harald Höller (harald-hoeller)]

as i wrote, that script does not resolve my problem with BCM4312

sudo modprobe b43
FATAL: Error inserting b43 (/lib/modules/2.6.24-11-generic/updates/drivers/net/wireless/b43/b43.ko): Unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter (see dmesg)

dmesg | grep b43
[ 42.110690] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_device_is_enabled
[ 42.110697] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_device_is_enabled
[ 42.110839] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_pcicore_dev_irqvecs_enable
[ 42.110842] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_pcicore_dev_irqvecs_enable
[ 42.110918] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_bus_may_powerdown
[ 42.110920] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_bus_may_powerdown
[ 42.111213] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_bus_unregister
[ 42.111216] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_bus_unregister
[ 42.111355] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_set_devtypedata
[ 42.111357] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_set_devtypedata
[ 42.111553] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_device_disable
[ 42.111555] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_device_disable
[ 42.111750] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_dma_set_mask
[ 42.111752] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_dma_set_mask
[ 42.111929] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_device_enable
[ 42.111931] b43: Unknown symbol ssb_device_enable
[ 42.112046] b43: disagrees about version of symbol ssb_driver_unregister
...

[Harald Höller (harald-hoeller)]

alright; last hardy updates resolve this problem for me (although sound is completely gone now).

[Moguai1978 (boss6661978)]

Same problem here with an Acer Extensa 5220. But with a fresh hardy-installation. Before bcm43xx works fine with gutsy.

Uninstalled bcm43xx-fwcutter and b43-fwcutter. Then installed b43-fwcutter and at the end loaded down and installed the b43-firmware. WLAN works but only right next to my router. When the distance was higher (about 10m) then the laptop wasn't able to connect. I found out that the signal was shown with a quality of 85-95 % in the network-manager when the Laptop was right next to my router. So the signal wasn't stable. Seems like the b43-driver and/or firmware is not so good.

So I uninstalled the b43-fwcutter and removed the b43-firmware. Than I installed the bcm43xx-fwcutter and at the end loaded down and installed the bcm43xx-firmware. Changed the bcm43xx-entry in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist into b43 and added bcm43xx to /etc/modules. After the restart the WLAN doesn't work (bcm43xx-driver and firmware loaded right). The network-manager doesn't find my WLAN-network.

Don't know if the signal-problems with b43 are because of the firmware or the driver. Would be nice, when it will be changed until the hardy-release. Maybe the problem can be fixed with a new b43-v.011-firmware?