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Re: BCM43228

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On 11/01/2013 05:00 PM, Ruben De Smet wrote:
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On 11/01/2013 04:31 PM, Larry Finger wrote:
Hi folks,

I'm currently running Broamcoms prorietary wl drivers, which
were running fine until I found a bug in the bluetooth part of
it, which panics the kernel at a certain position. I don't know
if it's a part in the GPL part of the kernel which panics, or if
it's in the Broadcom part, as the kernel is tainted by the
wireless driver and cannot be debugged that way.

lspci shows me this: 03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom
Corporation BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n

My question: will b43 ever support this chip? If so, I'd be able
to give someone access to this computer for debugging purposes.
I'd give any help possible, though kernels and modules aren't my
domain yet.

The short answer is "probably not". The reverse engineering process
is very time consuming and boring. What seems to work best is to
find a MIPS driver and disassemble it to form the kind of "specs"
that are seen at http://bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net/. Next a different
person needs to take that prescription and turn it into code. To
preserve the clean-room setting, those two parts must be done by
separate people. The process worked reasonably well for 802.11g
devices, but  the code gets very complicated for 802.11n. Further
complicating the issue is that at least one of two BCM43228 units
has an LCNXN PHY, and we have done little with that although the
web site shows WIP for that PHY with a BCM43227. The 2.4 GHz part
of the 227 probably matches that of the 228. Note that b43 has
never worked well with the 5 GHz radio in any of the chips.

Of course, if the RE is done perfectly, then you end up with all
the bugs of wl. :)

One other possibility is that the device might eventually be
supported by brcmsmac. That set of authors has the advantage of
having access to the Broadcom documentation and the wl sources. In
case that is a possibility, I added the linux-wireless mailing list
to this reply.

As shown at
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Supported_devices,
there are two different PCI IDs that are called BCM43228. When you
ask this kind of question, you should include the output of 'lspci
-nn' so that the ID is listed.

Larry


AFAIK, broadcom only offers it's drivers for intel x86 and x64_86; I
guess by MIPS, you mean the architecture? (why wouldn't the intel
driver work? Pretty unknown on the subject ;) )

I read the WIP mail about the 227 chip, I could possibly wait for that
one to be released and test it out on mine?

For the record: the issue I'm having is as follows: when connecting
via the bluetooth part of the chip to my phone and using DUN to
connect to the internet, everything works fine until I shut down the
connection. Then my kernel panics. (Another issue of course is the
fact that wl is the only closed source thing in my kernel running atm
on my notebook...)

On brcmsmac: is linux-wireless the right mailinglist to post to then?
I see that the range of supported devices is more close to my chip
than b43 is ;)
I added brcm80211-dev-list@xxxxxxxxxxxx to this mail too, which looks
like the more appropriate mailinglist to post the issue to.

Let me chime in on this. We always keep taps on linux-wireless so you are always right to post there. I created the brcm80211-dev-list so people can post their issues there regardless changes in the dev team. So address brcm80211 issues to brcm80211-dev-list and Cc the linux-wireless list. As a bonus that assures they are publicly archived.

Regards,
Arend

R

PS. snippet of the output of 'lspci -nn':

03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43228
802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4359]

Other information on request, will try to answer asap.
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