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

[TironN]

Ok well heres what Ive got at the moment:
Followed all the steps using compat-wireless-2010-03-04.
Its connected fine and all but is timing out. Turns out I'm getting the fatal dma errors. I think I may be running the wrong b43 version

[m1lkman]

I'm still playing with it but, short of reinstalling a fresh distribution on a partition. What's the best way to go about uninstalling some of these old and test kernels and remove them from grub menu to clean thing up?

[chenxiaolong]

TironN: You will have to take out your card, touch all the pins (at the same time) to short out the RAM circuit and put the card back in.

m1lkman: You can remove the old kernels using Synaptic or apt-get by running: (purge means remove package along with configuration files)

sudo apt-get purge linux-image-2.6.3*.*-generic
sudo apt-get purge linux-headers-2.6.3*.*-generic

Ubuntu tweak (http://ubuntu-tweak.com/) also has a tab in the program which lets you remove old kernels.

[rlelliott]

The drivers that come with the newest daily builds are giving me DMA errors. But if i load the wl driver @ boot, then load the compat b43 driver after login, everything works great..... very weird>

[Loader009]

Due to this fact (that b43 only works right after loading and unloading bcmwl) I think that b43 either doesn't load the NIC right or there is a firmware conflict.
Only an idea that I thougt.
Greetz

[chenxiaolong]

rlelliott: The compat-wireless build definitely should not give DMA errors because they are patched to use PIO mode. Are you sure you are the compat-wireless b43 driver and not the native kernel driver? The newest compat-wireless builds (actually, since February) don't compile under kernsl 2.6.32, only 2.6.33.

Loader009: I really have no idea at all. You might be right .

[rlelliott]

rlelliott: The compat-wireless build definitely should not give DMA errors because they are patched to use PIO mode. Are you sure you are the compat-wireless b43 driver and not the native kernel driver? The newest compat-wireless builds (actually, since February) don't compile under kernsl 2.6.32, only 2.6.33.

Loader009: I really have no idea at all. You might be right .

I was using the b43 driver that comes with the daily lucid builds without pio mode enabled. I would rather not use pio mode because it kills the overall output of the nic. Basicly i loaded the os, threw the bcm4312 firmware in the needed dir and rebooted the system. When it came back up, i had instant DMA errors. The only solution to this problem I have found is to install bcmwl, let it auto-load with the os, after log on, unload wl and load the compat wireless b43 driver with DMA mode enabled. I installed kde 4.4 on my latest lucid build, and man is it sweet. With my current Gnome/KDE hybrid Ubuntu Lucid build, wireless is functioning as intended and with vmware workstation installed I have no need to ever boot directly back into Windows 7 again. Wow...

[chenxiaolong]

Ohhhh. That's awesome. Can you see if it still works if you have the unloading and loading done automatically by putting this in /etc/rc.local (before "exit 0"):

rmmod wl
modprobe b43

By the way, KDE 4.4 is amazing .

[rlelliott]

Ohhhh. That's awesome. Can you see if it still works if you have the unloading and loading done automatically by putting this in /etc/rc.local (before "exit 0"):

rmmod wl
modprobe b43

By the way, KDE 4.4 is amazing .

I added the two entries above to rc.local and it worked! So those 2 commands automated the release and rebind of the nic and made the launchers i created obsolete.... good stuff. ty

[chenxiaolong]

Great! It's nice to know that it will work on the next Ubuntu version...one and a half months before the actual release .