Comments to b43's wiki page plus recent changes

[Larry Finger]

On 06/19/2011 06:17 PM, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
> I'm getting uncomfortable with recent changes made to b43 wiki page
> http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
>
> First we got Stuart who felt it's necessary to explain that "partially
> supported" on b43's page means it's "partially supported by b43". It
> was so obvious to me I just reverted that change. He also linked to
> some discussion with random BCM4322 issue on 2.6.38 kernel. Well,
> support in 2.6.38 was highly experimental, it got many more issues, I
> don't think it makes any sense to display all of them. 2.6.39 is
> suggested, that's all.
>
> Today we got David Wang's modification. He wrote instruction how to
> check if firmware was installed. I've no idea what's unclear with
> messages like:
> "Cannot open input file broadcom-wl-5.10.56.27.3/driver/wl_apsta/wl_prebuilt.o"
> "failed to create output directory: Permission denied"
> ?
>
> Plus I found the following checks quite silly:
> ls -1 "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR"| grep b43| wc -1
> ls -1 "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR"/b43| wc -l
> "An output of>5 is good"
>
> It also adds twice info about LP-PHY which is already duplicated:
>> Those of you who has bcm4315 (bcm4312 LP-PHY) and bcm4321 chipset, you will need to make sure you enable PIO mode as DMA mode does not work with your chipset. So instead of following the guide above you will need to do a few more extra steps:
> (We inform about LP-PHY and DMA problems in known issues).
>
> Additionally it provides not working right-away instruction about
> switching to pio:
>> modprobe -r b43
>> modprobe b43 pio=1
>> echo "options b43 pio=1">>  /etc/modprobe.d/options.conf
>
>
> Is it just me, or are that changes quite silly?
>
> Does anyone have contact to David Wang? He does not have his page on wiki.

As my son in law keeps reminding me, "You cannot fix stupid." I'm always 
assuming he is not referring to me! :)

Along a similar vein, the helpers on the openSUSE forums are consistently 
recommending that Broadcom users install wl and blacklist ssb and b43. I have 
given up trying to overcome that issue. I feel that if people fall for such bad 
info, then they deserve to have their wireless fail every time that the kernel 
is updated, and that kernel developers will ignore the oops reports coming from 
their tainted kernels.

You know as much or more than anyone about b43. Please make any cleanups that 
you want on the wiki.

Larry