[wireless-next][PATCH 0/3][ANNOUNCE] b43 the first Linux driver supporting HT-PHY (BCM4331)!

[Rafał Miłecki]

2011/8/27 James Anslow <james at jamesanslow.net>:
> On 26/08/11 19:41, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
>> After improving DMA (the important patch for BCM4331 is my one) we can finally
>> enable support for HT-PHY. The whole code has been written from MMIO dumps
>> grabbed from ndiswrapper+windows driver, but seems to be stable and was tested
>> by 3 people. Unfortunately there are still some missing conditions that can't
>> be fixed without RE the closed driver or having Broadcom co-operating. However
>> it seems we live with that well enough for basic usage :)
>>
>> BCM4331 doesn't have any Linux driver yet, both: wl and brcm80211 don't support
>> it. So we can be really proud of it ;) Ah, and I should mention that ndiswrapper
>> was frequently reported to lock up machines when working with this card (see
>> Ubuntu's forum about MacBook 8.1).
>>
>> To use b43 with BCM4331 you will need to grab the newest b43-fwcutter and
>> extract firmware from some recent closed source driver. See our wiki page in
>> few hours for nice howto.
>>
>> Big thanks go to David Woodhouse for providing me access to his MacBook, letting
>> grab the dumps, test patches and debugging a lot of hard cases with me (and
>> sometime without ;) ).
>>
>> Larry Finger (1):
>>   b43: Relax requirement for descriptors to be in the DMA zone
>>
>> Rafał Miłecki (2):
>>   b43: use 8K buffers for 64-bit DMA to workaround hardware bug
>>   b43: make HT-PHY support experimental
>>
>>  drivers/net/wireless/b43/Kconfig |    6 +++---
>>  drivers/net/wireless/b43/dma.c   |   31 ++++++++++++++++---------------
>>  drivers/net/wireless/b43/dma.h   |    3 ++-
>>  3 files changed, 21 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)
>>
>
> I've checked the wiki page and downloads area but the latest version of
> fwcutter that I could find was from several days ago.
>
> Can anyone direct me towards the latest b43-fwcutter download as
> mentioned above?
>
> Can't wait to get 4331 support!

Just use the howto for kernel 3.2 (I know it's a little tricky for now
to use 3.2, wireless-next is also OK for that howto):
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Other_distributions_not_mentioned_above

You have to:
1) Clone git repository wireless-next
2) Apply 3 patches from this patchset
3) Compile kernel with B43_PHY_HT
4) Install firmware (I think you already started that part)

b43-fwcutter in 015 version is alright for extracting 666.2 firmware.

-- 
Rafał