Firmware for reverse engineering b43?

[Jonas Gorski]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 14, 2026 at 1:31 PM Joshua Peisach <jpeisach at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue Apr 14, 2026 at 5:14 AM EDT, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > I think there's no easy answer - what are you even trying to achieve?
> > Does b43 not work sufficiently well? Do you even know if some specific
> > calibration have a tendency to go out of whack? Is there later firmware
> > that has some advantage (given how little actually happens in firmware
> > in these devices, I'd be surprised by that) but isn't compatible with
> > the driver now, and you want to change that?
> >
> > I'd be tempted to say that if there's no problem there don't try to fix
> > anything, the hardware is ancient anyway, likely has few users, and
> > those users would probably be fine with just leaving it?
> >
> > johannes
>
> The BCM4321 (nphy) doesn't connect to my 5G network, so I figured that
> by filling in TODOs and FIXME's, I could eventually get something
> working.
>
> Other than that, I was thinking of making improvements for the sake of
> improving the driver.

The initial version of the brcm80211 softmac driver [1] should also
help in making sense of some of the code (flag names etc). While it
officially only supports BCM43224 and newer on BCMA, it still had
remnants of support for older N-PHY revisions, so may help in finding
differences or explaining what code does.

I once considered trying to clean up b43 based on brcmsmac, but never
got around to it.

Best regards,
Jonas

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/a9533e7ea3c410fed2f4cd8b3e1e213e48529b75/drivers/staging/brcm80211