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

[piratesmack]

"pio=0 qos=1" (DMA mode, QOS off) both work fine.

Hmm, that's working for me, but only because it falls back to PIO mode when DMA fails

[chenxiaolong]

Oh...I guess I didn't notice that. I just checked dmesg :

[ 5226.381322] b43-phy2 ERROR: Fatal DMA error: 0x00000400, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000
[ 5226.381328] b43-phy2 ERROR: This device does not support DMA on your system. Please use PIO instead.
[ 5226.381333] b43-phy2: Controller RESET (DMA error) ...
[ 5226.742851] b43-phy2: Loading firmware version 478.104 (2008-07-01 00:50:23)
[ 5240.531256] b43-phy2: Controller restarted

[sduvick]

hey guys, i've been watching this thread for a long time, and previously the fixes put forth were working fine. I updated to Lynx lts a few days ago, compiled compat wireless and it worked for a day, then about half an hour into using my laptop, it dma'd on me. traditional FATAL DMA 0x0000000 .... I have tried "pio=1 qos=0" and "pio=0 qos=1" and neither have stopped the DMA. I did reset the card before and after the dmas occured.
any ideas?
ps. you guys do a great job of helping the regular users around here!

EDIT: I retried pio and qos and it gave me "unknown symbol in module" which pointed to pio. why can't it understand PIO now? it worked in the RC i had a few days ago?

EDIT 2: now i recompiled compat wireless and it's giving me MAC suspend failed.

[chenxiaolong]

First post updated. Please tell me if I made any errors. I am really tired right now .

[NIN101]

EDIT 2: now i recompiled compat wireless and it's giving me MAC suspend failed.

Same here.

As piratesmack wrotes, this is a solution:

options b43 pio=1 qos=0

rmmod b43
echo "options b43 pio=1 qos=0" > /etc/modprobe.d/b43.conf
modprobe b43

[mikeioannina]

Yes! it works
After a clean install of lucid I had to disassemble the whole netbook to take the card off to be able to boot. Then I did the steps in the first post and also installed b43-fwcutter and the card works fine with no errors! also monitor mode works but I haven't tested injection

[bond-o]

Followed the instructions and can see my b43 with 2.6.33-02063303-generic. However, WPA or wpa_supplicant seems to not be functioning properly for my hidden network. I have not tried a known good network with open authentication.

I have working scripts from Hardy, Intrepid, and Jaunty that will not work with Lucid. It seems as if a continuous loop occurs until it "crashes" the card. The loop starts at "sudo wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/home/"name"/Scripts/wpa_supplicant_home.conf -dd".


I also have working WICD "tweeked" configurations from Hardy and Intrepid returns "Bad Password". When viewing /var/lib/wicd/wlan0, the PSK continues to change to hex versus "passphrase". If I enter the hex within the WICD GUI, I still receive a "BAD Password" error and now the hex is changed to the passphrase format. And yes, I have manually edited to force both hex and passphrase with the same "Bad Password" error.

In addition, I have a Cisco AIR-CB21AG-A-K9 PC Card that produces the same results as above.

[TironN]

Well I've got it running perfectly under 2.6.34-rc5-lucid! Finally with pio=1 and qos=0 all is good!

I did try under 2.6.33 but dmesg returned:

b43: unknown parameter: 'pio'

Not sure if anyone's seen this because I would prefer to be running it on a stable release but what do you think?

[chenxiaolong]

bond-o: I noticed that you didn't list Karmic in the working distros. I could never get wpa_supplicant to work under Karmic. When you connect with wpa_supplicant, what does "dmesg" say? Does it says something like "Connecting to ap 00:##:##:##:##:## timed out"?

As for WiCD, the last time I used WiCD, it didn't require the SSID of a hidden network to connect, which is a problem, since the WPA hex key is generated from the SSID and the passphrase. I have no idea why it's converting the PSK back to a passphrase, as the router only accepts a PSK hex key while connecting .

Do you use WPA[2] with TKIP authentication on your network? If you do, could you try to modprobe b43 with "pio=1 qos=0 nohwcrypt" or you could try changing your router settings to WPA[2] with AES authentication. I use this and it works fine, with NetworkManager. I can test wpa_supplicant, if you want.

One more thing (sorry!), I'm using kernel 2.6.34-RC6. B43 seems to connect more reliably on that kernel.

TironN: B43 seems to connect more reliably on the 2.6.34 kernel. If you really want to use kernel 2.6.33, you can install compat-wireless to get it working, but seeing how quickly the RC's are released, 2.6.34 stable should be out soon .

By the way, kernel 2.6.34-RC6 is out now .

[bond-o]

chenxiaolong: I never installed Karmic and I was only on Jaunty for a short period of time due to issue between Virtual Box and VMware. I utilize my laptop for work and try to make it as stable as possible. I was moving to Lucid thinking that the LTS would have been more solid with networking.

Anyway, I ended up rebuilding due to a kernel issue that I could not correct and was receiving a crash during reboot.

So, I am currently running 2.6.32-21-generic-pae and have followed some your previous posts along with some others. I am experiencing the b43 loading, but receive the "b43-phy0 ERROR: CONFIG_B43_FORCE_PIO must be set in your kernel configuration." error. I have firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10) loaded. I added the b43.conf file as well as manually loading the driver with "pio and qos", but it returned "unknown pio", or something equivalent. So, I am guessing that this is a kernel issue.

As to WICD, I have made this work with my Cisco PC Card with the ath5k drivers. For some odd reason, WICD has changed the way the psk="$_PSK" was being handled. It was converting the passphrase into hex, but then injecting the hex with the " "'s to make it a passphrase. Thus, kicking back a bad password. In the versions I mentioned in my previous post, this worked without issue.

For more information regarding WICD and Hidden WPA Network, see http://wicd.net/punbb/viewtopic.php?id=566.