Broadcom STA kernel stub update for 2.6.28/2.6.29 kernel

[vlovich]

I recently found that the Broadcom STA driver does indeed work - when I had previously tried it from the Ubuntu repositories, it hadn't worked. The version from the Broadcom website worked from the first time for me, but it's kernel stub doesn't work past 2.6.27 - didn't find the specific reason, but presumably due to refactoring work in the wireless Linux subsystem.

Here's the patch (I haven't tested it with 2.6.28, but it's working fine with 2.6.29-rc4). In fact, the driver appears to work far better than the ndiswrapper version (better signal strength, better battery life).

The wifi chip I tested with is the tx2000 (BCM4328 802.11 a/b/g/n rev 03).

This is the best option so far until b43 supports this chipset.

[Ayuthia]

What version of the module are you using? I have been able to compile 5.10.27.14 without patches on 2.6.28.3.

[vlovich]

Whatever the one was on the site I gave the link to.

[TSJason]

This didn't work for me in 2.6.29 stable. The module failed to compile with the patch provided in this post. I found another patch that worked from the Pardus project and was able to get it compiled and loaded, however I couldn't connect to any AP's (iwlist scanning did, however work). Here was what I did:

svn co http://svn.pardus.org.tr/pardus/deve...rs/broadcom-wl
wget http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_s...0_79_10.tar.gz
mkdir hybrid_wl
cd hybrid_wl
tar zxfv ../hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5_10_79_10.tar.gz
patch -p1 < ../broadcom-wl/files/iwe_stream_api.patch
patch -p1 < ../broadcom-wl/files/linux-2.6.29.patch
patch -p1 < ../broadcom-wl/files/remove-module-aliases.patch
patch -p1 < ../broadcom-wl/files/wl_iw.patch
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.29/source M=`pwd` clean
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.29/source M=`pwd`
cp wl.ko /lib/modules/2.6.29/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/
depmod -a
modprobe wl

Maybe this will help someone else.

This is my hardware:

04:01.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43XG [14e4:4329] (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Netgear Unknown device [1385:7d00]
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 17
        Memory at dccfc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]

Unfortunately, according to linuxwireless http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43/devices this hardware isn't supported under b43 either. I'm stuck with ndiswrapper for the time being.