BCM43228

[Arend van Spriel]

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 at broadcom.com 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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