[Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

innsmouthrain · 2013-04-17 16:31:48

Hello

I have been trying to get an old Acer Aspire One working for a trip out of the country (where I don't want to carry the 6kg of a Clevo p150em on my back).

However, the wifi driver isn't working.

I've got the 14e4:4315 which is supposed to be supported according to this.

I quickly discovered the arch wiki page for Broadcom wifi drivers and I made sense of it after a little while, realizing that I probably should not blacklist anything or change much at all, contrary to a majority of the text there. The required drivers should be in the kernel, except for the firmware.

Looking at threads like https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117035 makes me think the only thing I should have to do is download the tarball from AUR, makepkg it, pacman -U it, reboot my system and be happy. Still I end up with a dmesg tail containing the

b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode5.fw" not found
b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43-open/ucode5.fw" not found
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Dri … cefirmware and download the correct firmware for this driver version. Please carefully read all instructions on this website.

Of course, all the files are in /usr/lib/firmware/b43 (there is no b43-open there though) and /lib is symlinked to there.

I'm unsure where to go with this now. Any clues?

Last edited by innsmouthrain (2013-04-18 13:24:16)

ewaller · 2013-04-17 17:14:14

Install b43-firmware from the AUR.
The thread you linked is ancient, and the package you might have installed based upon that thread is ambiguous.

What did you install?

All you should need is the stock b43 driver that comes with our kernel, and the b43-firmware which cannot be redistributed (which is why it lives in the AUR)

nomorewindows · 2013-04-17 17:55:51

Socialism, is, however, fully redistributable all of the time, but then again it never works. Nevermind.
b43-firmware from the aur should be all you need for that 4315 and those firmware files it's not finding, should be the ones it needs. They used to separate it out between b43 and b43-legacy, but I guess they aren't doing that anymore.

innsmouthrain · 2013-04-17 19:03:23

Yes. Maybe one day socialism will just naturally occur to everybody at the same time and we'll all take great care of ourselves. At that point we won't have to keep the firmware in AUR as it obviously won't be proprietary anymore.

Anyway. Just like in the linked thread, I downloaded b43-firmware from AUR. The problem is that I still get the error.

Stock b43 from kernel and b43-firmware from AUR. All the files seem to be in place in /usr/lib/firmware/b43. Nothing works.

ewaller · 2013-04-17 19:44:47

You seem to have the bases covered

So, I would look at other issues.
Are those files owned by root? Are the readable?
Are they on a file system that does not support permissions?
Are they on a file system that might not be mounted at the time the b43 module tries to load?

What happens if you rmmod b43, then (after verifying the firmware files are available) modprobing it again?

Just for fun, recheck that the kernel you are running matches the kernel modules installed (I don't think this is the issue, but compare the kernel from uname -a with that reported by pacman -Qi linux )
Another sanity check is to look at the output of pacman -Ql b43-firmware and make sure the files are present in the file system. (Again, I don't think this is the issue, but I am sifting through rubble here)

innsmouthrain · 2013-04-17 21:48:19

They are indeed owned by root, and are read and writable by root. Do they need to be executable?

Nothing weird about the filesystem, just standard ext4. They are on the same filesystem and partition as everything else.

And hehe yea. The kernel is a match.

A rmmod and modprobe of b43 gives the same "Firmware file "b43-open/ucode15.fw" not found" error.

pacman -Ql b43-firmware gives nothing though, it says the package was not found!

A pacman -Qs b43 gives only the b43-fwcutter package for results. Do you think this matters? If I try to install the package again (without removing the firmware files), it does not say that it's a reinstall like I think it ought to. Instead it just ends with errors, stating that the file exists in the filesystem for every .fw file.

innsmouthrain · 2013-04-17 21:55:20

Removing the files in /usr/lib/firmware/b43 and then installing the package without a reboot makes pacman -Qs find the package. A modprobe at this point resulted in walls of text about alot of things I didn't understand (kthread, try_request_fw, do_page_fault, etc) and in there I saw something about a reboot being needed. It also seems to kind of freeze.

I think I have rebooted the machine at one of these apparent freezes during an earlier attempt, but I'll plug the power in and let it do it's thing for a couple of hours to see what happens.

Hm, it ends with "---[ end trace 73c80454636544637 ]---"

Wish I had graphics or tmux installed so I could do use the scrollback. I'll report more tomorrow.

nomorewindows · 2013-04-18 00:49:21

innsmouthrain wrote:

Removing the files in /usr/lib/firmware/b43 and then installing the package without a reboot makes pacman -Qs find the package. A modprobe at this point resulted in walls of text about alot of things I didn't understand (kthread, try_request_fw, do_page_fault, etc) and in there I saw something about a reboot being needed. It also seems to kind of freeze.
I think I have rebooted the machine at one of these apparent freezes during an earlier attempt, but I'll plug the power in and let it do it's thing for a couple of hours to see what happens.

Hm, it ends with "---[ end trace 73c80454636544637 ]---"
Wish I had graphics or tmux installed so I could do use the scrollback. I'll report more tomorrow.

You had an oops or segfault or both.

innsmouthrain · 2013-04-18 06:29:04

nomorewindows wrote:

innsmouthrain wrote:
Hm, it ends with "---[ end trace 73c80454636544637 ]---"
Wish I had graphics or tmux installed so I could do use the scrollback. I'll report more tomorrow.
You had an oops or segfault or both.

Great! That's what I thought. What now? Is it worth debugging it and try to make sense of it? Do I just file a report to the wireless linux folks?

innsmouthrain · 2013-04-18 12:47:37

With the help of #archlinux at freenode I removed the bcma module (after all!) and it made the kernel alot happier.

So with bcma blacklisted I have a wlan0 interface! So cigars and whiskey for that but I have now encountered the problem that I find no networks using wifi-menu.

:: Scanning for networks
> No networks found [FAILED]

Using "rfkill list" I see that nothing is blocked.

Furthermore, using "modinfo b43" showed me that there is a parm named hwpctl which can assume 0 or 1. However, trying the different values changed nothing.

innsmouthrain · 2013-04-18 13:23:57

Suddenly works. No idea why. Don't think I changed anything.

stefanhartman · 2013-05-26 15:46:10

Hi,

I just went through a very similar problem and thought I should post here.

I went through a fresh install of Arch using a USB wireless dongle using carl firmware. For some reason (can't remember why) I manually copied carl firmware from my previous install to make it work.
Anyway, after installing I wanted to start using my built in Broadcom card (4311 by the way) so installed b43-firmware from AUR. Installation finished without errors.
I 'ip link' and see nothing new. I then

rmmod b43
modprobe b43

and get a freeze. Force shut down, reboot and

dmesg | grep b43

and see

b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43/ucode5.fw" not found
b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file "b43-open/ucode5.fw" not found
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Dri … cefirmware and download the correct firmware for this driver version. Please carefully read all instructions on this website.

so I check whether the files exist and they do. I check permissions and see the same as innsmouthrain. I check

pacman -Ql b43-firmware

and it returns nothing. Try to reinstall b43-firmware package and see the same '.. exists on filesystem' errors. I then completely removed the b43 folder in /usr/lib/firmware/, removed and installed b43-firmware again. Again checked with

pacman -Ql b43-firmware

and hooray the files show up.
Reboot then

[stefan@stefan-laptop ~]$ dmesg | grep b43
[    8.011883] b43-phy0: Broadcom 4311 WLAN found (core revision 10)
[    8.046772] b43-phy0: Found PHY: Analog 4, Type 2 (G), Revision 8
[   38.693449] b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 666.2 (2011-02-23 01:15:07)
[   63.843422] b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 666.2 (2011-02-23 01:15:07)
[   75.213447] b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 666.2 (2011-02-23 01:15:07)
[   76.582325] b43 ssb0:0 wlan0: disabling HT/VHT due to WEP/TKIP use

followed by

ip link set wlan0 up
wifi-menu

It tells me also

:: Scanning for networks
> No networks found    [FAILED]

I try again immediately afterwards and it succeeds.

So that is my story. I didn't need to blacklist bcma by the way. I tried once using both 'blacklist' and 'install' but failed due to b43 being unable to load. According to the wiki

Since kernel 3.3, the brcmsmac module actually uses bcma, so bcma needs to be unblacklisted or the Wi-Fi interface will not appear.

so I stopped pursuing that route after reading that.

I don't know why the files did initially not belong to b43-firmware and why they were not being found. There's a slight chance that I copied by old b43 files manually during installation as well ( I can't remember but it's a very slim chance), tough I think I would have seen errors during first install of b43-firmware then.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-04-17 16:31:48

[Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#2 2013-04-17 17:14:14

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#3 2013-04-17 17:55:51

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#4 2013-04-17 19:03:23

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#5 2013-04-17 19:44:47

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#6 2013-04-17 21:48:19

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#7 2013-04-17 21:55:20

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#8 2013-04-18 00:49:21

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#9 2013-04-18 06:29:04

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#10 2013-04-18 12:47:37

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#11 2013-04-18 13:23:57

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

#12 2013-05-26 15:46:10

Re: [Solved?] more Broadcom wireless b43 problems?

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