Thread: HOWTO: Use b43 driver with 14e4:4315 (Broadcom bcm4312 rev 01)

I did the fix on 10.10, which has finally allowed the wireless card to work, but the performance is nevertheless quite weak.
Every so often, the connection would drop. File transfer via SSH guarantees that connection will be killed. Every time the connection is killed, I must restart network-manager to re-connect.

This really is a miserable piece of hardware made by Broadcom!

I'm running 10.10 on a Gateway 7330gz with Broadcom BCM4306/3 network card. Connection keeps dropping and often will not connect at all. The B43 drivers worked fine on 9.10, but I guess that went out the window. Is there any chance at all that some sort of update will occur to fix the problem everyone here is having?

Finally got it working on a brand-new install of 10.10 after just too many hours of trial and error . For the greater parish, here's the info: standard Dell Vostro 1320 (core duo T6600 with BCM 4312 rev 01, with our beloved PCI ID 14e4:4315, Phoenix BIOS rev A08 - latest from the Dell website).

Initially I tried the STA driver mentioned in earlier posts as well as the standard approach suggested with the original FW from broadcom (4.150.10.5) for the B43 module, both solutions did not work on this baby. After checking the syslog, I noticed strange DMA errors ocurring with B43 driver as already pointed out earlier in this thread. Almost on the edge of getting the development environment ready for a custom kernel-compile, I did more research only to find out that the existing version of the driver falls back into PIO mode if DMA errors keep ocurring (something that's missing from the logs BTW!).

The solution for this particular type of h/w was actually going for a different version of the firmware as outlined in wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43. The version you're looking for is 4.178.10.4. Once you've followed the instructions and installed the low-power firmware with fw-cutter, the interface works after a suitable reboot.

This eliminates the need for going for any ndiswrapper business... (if this is possible at all for this wireless card?)

Originally Posted by rlelliott

On a Lenovo G550 R6U, after putting notebook in hibernation, when it came back up, dmesg shows that the the card is having dma errors. I powered down the machine. After sitting for about 20 seconds, powered on the machine. I rmmod wl, then modprobe b43. No DMA errors. I have not tried to load b43 without first loading the wl driver. Has anyone tested this?

My advise to you is switch the minipci adapter for another one. I can help you switch it if you want, drop me a PM if interested. I am running this machine flawlessly now using an intel miniPCI

Has anybody try this out?
http://wiki.frugalware.org/index.php...ource_firmware

Originally Posted by saipu

Has anybody try this out?
http://wiki.frugalware.org/index.php...ource_firmware

Latest OpenFWWF:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/maranello/

The success was a short one as the device switched over to working on an on-and-off basis only more and more frequently. I finally managed to track it down to a bug in the intersection of the 2.6.35-23 kernel that comes out of the box with 10.10, the module dell_laptop in charge of the hardware wifi switch (aka the wfkillswitch) and the driver I installed as described in my earlier post.

After numerous cul-de-sacs I went down including downgrading to 2.6.3x and 2.6.2x kernels, different broadcom drivers including an ndiswrapper alternative, here's a solution that finally worked for me: a complete re-install of 9.10, automatic upgrade to 10.04 LTS and then a manual upgrade to 10.10 (as this was not LTS at the time of installation yet - see www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade for details). When installing 9.10, I chose the STA driver via the Administration->Additional Driver menu option, confirming that it worked OK with the kill switch on the kernel that came with 9.10 (2.6.31-22). Keeping the kernel to 2.6.35-22 across the upgrade to 10.10 worked for me and I haven't encountered any of the mentioned problems in this LOOOONG thread so far. I hope that finally the kernels guys will eliminate this bug in a future release - or maybe this open source firmware will do the trick?

This Broadcom card is supported by wl driver on Lucid Mavarick and above.

But it has problems due improper modules load.

Try these steps:

http://polach.cc/broadcom-wifi-adapt...x-on-ubuntu-ii

to get working wireless for the Broadcom Cards with wl driver. b43 is obsolete for many hardware now...

Originally Posted by zdenal

This Broadcom card is supported by wl driver on Lucid Mavarick and above.

But it has problems due improper modules load.

Try these steps:

http://polach.cc/broadcom-wifi-adapt...x-on-ubuntu-ii

to get working wireless for the Broadcom Cards with wl driver. b43 is obsolete for many hardware now...

I've tried, but it doesn't work for me. The solution that works for me is to use b43 driver install instructions from here and to force b43 module to use PIO mode instead of DMA. It is described here.

Originally Posted by chenxiaolong

2010-05-23: B43 works out of the box with the 14e4:4315 card in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with PIO mode on and QOS off (on kernel 2.6.33.4 or 2.6.34).

And what about compact-wireless and blacklisting wl/bcm43xx, etc..?