Wireless BCM4312 with the 3.10, 3.11, 3.12 and 3.13 kernels
The hybrid driver from Broadcom was updated again in September (2013) with all the previous patches and a few other fixes as well. This brings them up to support linux kernel 3.9, which is very much welcome.
Sadly it breaks again with >= 3.10 with many warnings and errors which isn’t good considering that Ubuntu (13.10) Saucy Salamander is about to be released.
We do have a patch for you though that gets us working again up to the 3.11 kernel.
Chipsets supported by “Broadcom’s IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux® device driver” are: BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4313, BCM4321, BCM4322, BCM43224, BCM43225, BCM43227 and BCM43228.
Wireless BCM4312 with the 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 kernel
As a follow up to , I’ve also tested the Broadcom hybrid driver with the 3.6, 3.7 and the soon to be released 3.8 kernels with success. There have been no major changes that should effect the operation of this driver.
To verify that everything is working as expected on the software side, when modprobe or insmod wl, you should get a similar dmesg output:
[ 307.560347] lib80211: common routines for IEEE802.11 drivers
[ 307.560353] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm ‘NULL’
[ 307.564524] wl: module license ‘unspecified’ taints kernel.
[ 307.564529] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
Wireless BCM4312 with the 3.4 and 3.5 kernel
The hybrid driver from Broadcom is still a bit behind in terms of support for the latest kernels but there are workarounds. This particular issue also effects other kernel modules such as the out of tree Nvidia and ATI blobs that require the asm/system.h file in their includes.
I’ve had success with replacing it with asm/switch_to.h which seems to have fixed things for now. The cause for this can be found on the LKML.
Chipsets supported by “Broadcom’s IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux® device driver” are: BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4313, BCM4321, BCM4322, BCM43224, and BCM43225, BCM43227 and BCM43228.
Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) and AMD Catalyst 12.4
Precise Pangola has been released and a day later comes a new fglrx driver. While there isn’t a changelog, this build apparently gives us:
early-look support for Ubuntu 12.04, Linux PowerXpress support for the Intel Ivy Bridge platform, packaging script updates, and various bug-fixes.
Among the bug-fixes for Catalyst 12.4 on Linux are: fixing some multi-head issues, a system hang in certain PowerXpress configurations, fixing a system hang when using OpenGL overlays, correcting an OpenGL performance drop, a soft-hang when killing the X Server, and severe corruption for OpenGL games using the AMD “Redwood” graphics processors.
If you want to build these for yourself then you can follow these instructions:
Read more
Wireless BCM4312 3.2 kernel
Since there is an Ubuntu package ‘firmware-b43-lpphy-installer’ which is up to date and will work against the 3.0 kernel, my earlier posts are obsolete. If you are not running Ubuntu, then you will still need to reference my post.
The latest 3.2 Linux kernel however has a few ABI changes, most notably in the network stack which effects the Broadcom’s wl module. Most notably is: .ndo_set_multicast_list which was replaced with .ndo_set_rx_mode.
