Broadcom 43xx wireless - here we are again (f8)

[John W. Linville]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 08:15:38PM +0100, Klaus-Peter Schrage wrote:

> With b43 configured following
> 	http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
> I still only get a very slow and unstable connection oscillating between
> 1 and 5.5 Mb/s, so I switched to b43legacy, adding
> 	alias wlan0 b43legacy
> to /etc/modprobe.conf and blacklisting b43, having loaded the version 3 
> firmware according to the above mentioned driver site.

This won't work.  The b43 and b43legacy drivers are actually SSB
drivers, with the PCI ID of your device used to load a PCI<->SSB bridge
driver.  That code then loads the appropriate SSB driver based on SSB
wireless core revision.  In short, b43legacy just doesn't recognize
your device.  At present there is no runtime trick equivalent to what
we used to load bcm43xx in F7.

Since the device is working at low speeds for you, you might experiment
with limiting the maximum rate so as to avoid rate oscillations:

	iwconfig wlan0 rate 5.5M auto

You could then experiment to see if you can bump the rate higher.

I'll look at ways to load b43legacy as an alternative driver (without
having to recompile the kernel).  But for now, the above is all I
have to offer.

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at redhat.com