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rabarrett

Member

Registered: 2012-07-05

Posts: 99

SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

I used to have this onboard wifi working without any problems.  When I was trouble shooting some other issues, I switched to a wired connection.  Now, I can't seem to get my wifi card working again.

# lspci -vnn -d 14e4:
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Limited BCM4352 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:43b1] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: AzureWave Device [1a3b:2123]
	Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 10
	Memory at f7e00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=32K]
	Memory at f7c00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=2M]
	Capabilities: [48] Power Management version 3
	Capabilities: [58] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
	Capabilities: [68] Vendor Specific Information: Len=44 <?>
	Capabilities: [ac] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
	Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
	Capabilities: [13c] Device Serial Number 24-0a-00-ff-ff-00-00-01
	Capabilities: [150] Power Budgeting <?>
	Capabilities: [160] Virtual Channel
	Capabilities: [1b0] Latency Tolerance Reporting
	Capabilities: [220] #15
	Kernel modules: bcma
 

Yet,

 $ dmesg |grep bcma 

returns nothing.

From what I can tell here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_wireless

I have a card that should be loaded automatically.

However,

 $ ip link 

returns

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp0s25: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether d0:50:99:27:6f:45 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

showing no wifi connection.

It used to come up as 3: 
at wlp1s0 (or something like that)

Last edited by rabarrett (2017-04-01 22:00:12)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,772

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

As a sanity check, what are the output of uname -a and of pacman -Q linux 
?

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rabarrett

Member

Registered: 2012-07-05

Posts: 99

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

$ uname -a
Linux <host> 4.10.6-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Mar 27 08:28:22 CEST 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ pacman -Q linux

linux 4.10.6-1

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,772

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

Okay, that is rational, assuming you found it necessary to redact the host name.  If that is the actual output, there may be issues.

---

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

rabarrett

Member

Registered: 2012-07-05

Posts: 99

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

...assuming you found it necessary to redact the host name.

Not exactly necessary, but good general practice to avoid the cases where it's important but doesn't immediately seem important to me.

  If that is the actual output...

Yes, except for

<host>

the rest was merely copied and pasted.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,772

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

Okay, I missed something.  Oddly, the lspci output says that the bcma module is in use.  Any sign off 'bcma' in the journal?
what is the output of iwlist

---

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

rabarrett

Member

Registered: 2012-07-05

Posts: 99

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

Nothing in the journal from this boot.  If I look back to 1 March 2017, the only mention is when I half hearted tried to install it, though I didn't expect that to work since it's included in the kernel to my knowledge. 
--same output from

$ journalctl |grep bcma

without date restriction.  Just the one attempt to install bcma.

(just inadvertently sent that to "report" instead of "reply")

Last edited by rabarrett (2017-04-01 15:24:36)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,772

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

(just inadvertently sent that to "report" instead of "reply")

Yeah, I saw that

Does bcma show up in lsmod  ?

---

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

Docbroke

Member

From: India

Registered: 2015-06-13

Posts: 1,433

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

Have you modified your mkinitcpio.conf ??

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Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,523

Website

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

From what I can tell here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_wireless

I have a card that should be loaded automatically.

Based on what?  It looks like you'd need broadcom-wl for that chip.

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rabarrett

Member

Registered: 2012-07-05

Posts: 99

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

To ewaller:

No, it doesn't show up in lsmod.

To Docbroke:

Not manually, but I was troubleshooting an issue that led my system to fail at boot.  It had frozen during a regular pacman -Syu update (and also while I was working to resolve the harfbuzz/infinality issue).
https://www.ostechnix.com/fix-harfbuzz- … rch-linux/

At one point, the bootloader wasn't pointing to the right partition anymore.  I've resolved those issues now, but one of my initial responses was to run through some of the basic install moves from the install guide, so I had booted up with a USB and run

 # mkinitcpio -p linux 

But I don't remember doing anything to the mkinitcpio.conf directly.

rabarrett

Member

Registered: 2012-07-05

Posts: 99

Re: SOLVED: Broadcom kernel modules not loading BCM4352

Based on what?  It looks like you'd need broadcom-wl for that chip.

It's a good question.  I had checked before, but wasn't fully clear on how to read that page:
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/use … f_hardware

The chart just has a blank space for most entries, without saying what a blank page means.  The "wl" entry is also vague.  Of course, it had occurred to me that wl means I need to install the broadcom-wl package, but I firmly remembered having it all work smoothly without installing a driver, and I didn't want to complicate matters by installing a superfluous one.

But after Trilby's comment, I thought, "Why not install it and check to be sure?"  So I installed broadcom-wl

It works.  And it has dawned on me now that it is my laptop (not desktop) that has the other one.  For a long time (first year or so) I didn't use to use my desktop's wireless at all, but just used a wired connection.

Still, this doesn't explain how I lost the broadcom-wl driver.  I had it all working a month ago and then it stopped working.  I suspect it had something to do with my solution to the harfbuzz/infinality issue.  After I ran some of those updates, none of my AUR packages would update until I reinstalled a few packages.  Something must have removed or corrupted the broadcom-wl package too.

Thanks Trilby!
(marked as solved)

Last edited by rabarrett (2017-04-02 02:34:37)