I've recently started having trouble with my Broadcom BCM43XX series WiFi card on F7T3. I have historically used bcm43xx-fwcutter to extract the firmware from my laptop's Windows drivers.
My laptop is a Dell D610 and I'm using the firmware that is included with the latest available version of Windows drivers supplied by Dell for this laptop.
I've extracted the firmware to /lib/firmware as usual, but now I get the following errors at startup:
kernel: bcm43xx: Microcode rev 0x173, pl 0x425 (2006-10-04 21:02:04) kernel: bcm43xx: Firmware: no support for microcode extracted from version 4.x binary drivers. kernel: bcm43xx: core_up for active 802.11 core failed (-95)
I should also note that I continue to use the latest available rawhide updates. This used to work with F7T2 and earlier. What has changed?
Cheers,
Chris
Christopher A. Williams <chrisw <at> cawllc.com> writes:
kernel: bcm43xx: Firmware: no support for microcode extracted from version 4.x binary drivers.
The softmac version of the bcm43xx driver wants a firmware revision <=3.x, the mac80211 (Devicescape 802.11 stack) version of the driver wants a firmware revision 4.x. (It's not directly related to the underlying 802.11 stack, it's just that the mac80211 version is the development version of the driver, the softmac version is the stable one.) Apparently, you previously got the mac80211 version and now get the softmac version of the driver for some reason.
Unfortunately, I can't answer the question you'll probably have next, which is why you suddenly got a different version of the driver as the default. I know the F7 Rawhide kernels are shipping both 802.11 stacks, and bcm43xx is one of the drivers present in both, but I don't know how the kernel decides which of the drivers to load. That's probably a question for the Fedora kernel maintainers.
Kevin Kofler
On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 00:54 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Christopher A. Williams <chrisw <at> cawllc.com> writes:
kernel: bcm43xx: Firmware: no support for microcode extracted from version 4.x binary drivers.
The softmac version of the bcm43xx driver wants a firmware revision <=3.x, the mac80211 (Devicescape 802.11 stack) version of the driver wants a firmware revision 4.x. (It's not directly related to the underlying 802.11 stack, it's just that the mac80211 version is the development version of the driver, the softmac version is the stable one.) Apparently, you previously got the mac80211 version and now get the softmac version of the driver for some reason.
Unfortunately, I can't answer the question you'll probably have next, which is why you suddenly got a different version of the driver as the default. I know the F7 Rawhide kernels are shipping both 802.11 stacks, and bcm43xx is one of the drivers present in both, but I don't know how the kernel decides which of the drivers to load. That's probably a question for the Fedora kernel maintainers.
Thanks! That was definitely it. I switched to an older 3.x version of the firmware and connected straight away.
Guess we'll have to wait for the kernel developers as to why this changed again.
Cheers,
Chris
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Christopher A. Williams -
Kevin Kofler