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strayhay

Member

Registered: 2022-02-24

Posts: 11

Bluetooth issue, kernel module not properly loaded at booting?

My laptop is a 2015 macbook pro (retina) which has Broadcom BCM43602 rev 01 chip. The brcmfmac kernel driver works perfectly for WiFi except for maybe 3 occasions in the past one year, which iirc was a known issue about WiFi randomly disconnecting after sleep or upon booting (because kernel module loading issue or something).

However, bluetooth was terrible, I suspect that brcmfmac or some parts of it (?) might not be loading properly because:

- Got "no default controller" error
- The bluetooth device was listed in lsusb. rfkill did not block anything. journalctl mentioned timeouts but that did not lead to any working solutions. dmesg was not particularly useful. I found a few posts that were highly similar to mine, here or on reddit, but they either magically resolved themselves & OP has no clue, or OP gave up.
- Tried the cold boot suggestion (to force a fireware reload) & others in the wiki, also no luck
- I installed broadcom-wl because I was just out of ideas... I did not know much about kernel drivers, so after installation I just rebooted, and saw WiFi was down. Thought to call it a day, I removed broadcom-wl and reboot.
- Bluetooth magically worked!
- Audio was somewhat choppy. Keyboard works perfect. I tweaked audio settings in pulseaudio to troubleshoot sound glitches.
- Pulseaudio daemon refused to restart after being killed...
- I rebooted instead.
- Bluetooth was once again dead. Again, "no default controller".

Since broadcom-wl install-reboot-uninstall-reboot sequence seems to have solved the issue once... I tried to do that again. It did not work this time. modprobe to remove & load brcmfmac doesn't resolve this.

WiFi was always good when brcmfmac is loaded. It would be down if I use b43 (legacy or not, with ]either of the firmware AUR packages) or broadcom-wl. There were no system updates between the above actions.

I think there must be a little something wrong with the loading of brcmfmac, but I have zero idea what to look at now...

Any suggestion is welcomed. Thank you.

Bluetooth stack:

$ pacman -Q | grep blue
blueman 2.3.2-1
bluez 5.65-3
bluez-hciconfig 5.63-1
bluez-libs 5.65-3
bluez-utils 5.65-3
pulseaudio-bluetooth 16.1-1

Kernel and stuff:

$ uname -r
5.19.10-arch1-1

$ pacman -Q | grep ^linux
linux 5.19.10.arch1-1
linux-api-headers 5.18.15-1
linux-firmware 20220815.8413c63-1
linux-firmware-whence 20220815.8413c63-1
linux-headers 5.19.10.arch1-1

(edit: typos)

Last edited by strayhay (2022-09-25 01:12:13)