Arch Linux

expatiate-orangutans

Member

Registered: 2019-07-11

Posts: 6

[OBVIATED]card found, kernel mod loaded, but no wifi dev on macbook...

I've installed arch on quite a few other machines, but today I tried for the first time to put it on a brand new macbook pro. It hasn't gone very well. For one thing, the keyboard doesn't work, although I've been able to use an external keyboard, and I understand I may be able to install a new driver for that later. But the real problem has been my inability to bring up wifi.

lspci shows that  the broadcom chip is detected, it's using driver wl (broadcom-wl is version 6.30.223.271-117, the latest), and has device id 4464. That's not listed in any of the compatibility lists for broadcom, but they're pretty out of date, and generally don't even refer to the wl driver, just the open-source ones. However, `ip link` lists only the loopback device.  On this page:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_wireless

It says that (maybe) it's necessary to blacklist conflicting modules. I can't tell what exactly the conflicting modules are, but I did find this (for the dkms version):

https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/comm … om-wl-dkms

And none of those modules were loaded. I tried removing anything that sounded like it could have anything to do with broadcom and running depmod -a, but no new network device is created.

I'm under the impression that the way this is supposed to work is that once you insert the right kernel module, udev will automatically create the appropriate device. Maybe that's wrong, so if somebody could explain how it actually works that might help. But in any case, thinking that maybe some trigger wasn't firing properly, I manually ran `udevadm trigger` which did not fix it.

Separately, I also tried removing all the wl-related modules and loading b43, running depmod -a and udevadm trigger, and then removing everything related to it and doing the same for brcmsmac, brcmfmac, and b44. No result for any of them.

I noticed that b44 was actually an ethernet driver, not a wifi driver, and considered that since the chip had id 4464, it might be an ethernet chip, not a wifi chip, since it doesn't say anything in the title but that it's a Broadcom network controller. But that seems unlikely for many reasons, and in any case I'm not seeing an ethernet device come up either. If I could, I might be able to use ethernet-over-usb with one of the thunderbolt ports, which would be good enough for the moment, but that doesn't seem to work.

I can get various logs but there's very little of interest in them. dmesg has several hundred applesmc errors, basically all

send_byte(0x10, 0x0304) fail: 0xff
#KEY: read arg fail

over and over. But I don't necessarily think this has anything to do with this; applesmc appears to just be fans and that kind of thing. There was also a line `bluetooth: hci0: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM.hcd failed with error -2." Other than that, just business as usual in the logs. But i'll try to add them anyway later. Apart from dmesg, journalctl, lsmod, and lspci -vvvv, what should I be providing here?

I would really appreciate any help anyone can give me on this. I had read on the wiki that arch on macbooks basically just works. The wiki hadn't steered me wrong before, so I went out and bought a fancy new macbook pro, and it basically doesn't work. I mean, Mac OS works, but that doesn't count. Real operating systems don't work.

Last edited by expatiate-orangutans (2019-07-11 20:28:03)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,738

Re: [OBVIATED]card found, kernel mod loaded, but no wifi dev on macbook...

If your dmesg ringbuffer overflows post

journalctl -kb

but yes definitely start with posting these commands you've identified

expatiate-orangutans

Member

Registered: 2019-07-11

Posts: 6

Re: [OBVIATED]card found, kernel mod loaded, but no wifi dev on macbook...

Nevermind; I've gotten rid of the new macbook. On the basis of what I read here:

https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

the chance of arch (or any distro; I tried a few and as I expected they all failed the same way) working as flawlessly as I'm used to any time soon is unlikely. I've added a wiki warning pointing people to this info so they won't make the same mistake I did.