bcm43xx firmware is too old

[alan]

On Fri, 11 May 2007, Clifford Snow wrote:

> Received the following error message on F7 Test 4:
> kernel: bcm43xx_mac80211: YOUR FIRMWARE IS TOO OLD. Firmware from binary
> drivers older than version 4.x is unsupported. You must upgrade your
> firmware files.
>
> I am unable to find a newer bcmwl5.sys to extract the firmware with
> bcm43xx-fwcutter.  If I find a driver with a version that should work,
> it fails the md5 check.
>
> Also, bcm43xx worked great under FC6.
>
> Any suggestions?  I'm hesitant to file a bug, since this sounds like a
> user problem.

This really depends on the model number and revision of your chipset.

I have a bcm4306 revision 2 chipset.  The bcm43xx_mac80211 driver will not 
work for me.  (The chipset does not have enough memory for the revision 4 
firmware.)  I had to blacklist that driver and use the old bcm43xx driver.

Later chipsets can handle the new firmware.  It seems that there is a bit 
of overlap on pci ids involving this chipset.

-- 
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
                                   - Alan Cox