[arch-general] b43: wireless issues

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Magnus Therning's message of 2010-06-18 01:22:48 +0200:
> I'm having problems getting my wireless connection to work properly.
> 
> It's a broadcom card, using the b43 driver.  It connects fine on
> login, but once I actually use the network I'm disconnected and all
> attempts to re-connect fail.
> 
> I've found some reports of similar behaviour online, but none seem to
> offer any good solutions to it :-(  So I'm trying my luck in here
> instead.
> 
> One person mentioned that things started working much better if he
> limited the network to 802.11b (not g), but I haven't seen any obvious
> way of achieving this.  Any hints on what I can do to test that
> myself?
> 
> $ lspci -vnn |grep 14e4
> 03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312
> 802.11b/g [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
> 
> I did extract some stuff from dmesg that might be of importance, but I
> really couldn't tell:
> 
> b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/ucode15.fw
> b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/lp0initvals15.fw
> b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/lp0bsinitvals15.fw
> b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 478.104 (2008-07-01 00:50:23)
> 
> b43-phy0 ERROR: Fatal DMA error: 0x00000800, 0x00000000, 0x00000000,
> 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000
> b43-phy0 ERROR: This device does not support DMA on your system.
> Please use PIO instead.
> b43-phy0: Controller RESET (DMA error) ...
> b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 478.104 (2008-07-01 00:50:23)
> b43-phy0: Controller restarted
> 
> Cheers,
> M

Hi.
I have the same chip and same issue. I found out that the b43 devs
didn't figure out yet how to get the chip to work correctly, so unless
something changed during the last weeks/months there's no real solution.
Using the apparently slower PIO instead of DMA is a kernel compiletime
option so far, but I read that as a workaround it's a module load option
beginning with .34.
It's a pity, the chip should have worked beginning with I afair .30. I
wasted loads of time trying to get it to work, without luck.
The broadcom driver works afair, but it annoyed me for some reasons.
So for now I'm looking forward to .34 to hopefully have at least working
wifi, even if slow.
-- 
Regards,
Philipp

--
"Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen." Bertolt Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan