b43 and late 2008 model Apple MacBook

[Larry Finger]

On 06/04/2011 07:13 PM, Stuart Longland wrote:
> On 06/05/11 10:08, Stuart Longland wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been battling the wireless card in this late-2008 model MacBook
>> which dual-boots Mac OS X (which works fine on wireless) and Gentoo
>> Linux, which has been giving me no end of grief.
>
> Apologies, should have mentioned the lspci output:
>> 03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)
>>          Subsystem: Apple Computer Inc. Device 008d
>>          Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 23
>>          Memory at 93100000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
>>          Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
>>          Capabilities: [58] Vendor Specific Information: Len=78<?>
>>          Capabilities: [e8] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
>>          Capabilities: [d0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
>>          Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
>>          Capabilities: [13c] Virtual Channel
>>          Capabilities: [160] Device Serial Number b6-b7-6c-ff-ff-83-00-23
>>          Capabilities: [16c] Power Budgeting<?>
>>          Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
> Regards,

The lspci output helped a lot, but the PCI ID from "lspci -nn" would have been a 
little more helpful, but the fact that is an 802.11n device is probably sufficient.

Coverage of the "n" devices with b43 did not become very good until 2.6.39 and 
those changes were too invasive to be backported to earlier kernels. Using the 
git tree from wireless-testing should work. With PC hardware, many people use 
the proprietary "wl" driver. I'm not certain if that works on MacIntel hardware, 
but the latest b43 should be OK.

Larry