bcm43xx driver does not work

[drongo]

Hi,
I have a Dell Precision M70 work laptop. Since the bcm43xx driver was first included in Puppy (round about 2.1something) this has worked fine. Doesn't work with the latest 4.1 alpha5, although I'm pretty sure it worked with 4.0 Dingoes.

Everything (including wireless) works fine on my home laptop (cheap Medion) so I'm pretty sure it's not a network wizard problem or a problem with my Wifi router.

The network wizard picks up that the bcxm43xx is loaded. I'm slightly reluctant to experiment as my WiFi was extremely flakey after booting back into XP, so I assume the Linux driver does something extremely low level to the Broadcom chip that XP doesn't even read/set. (I'm not imagining this, I have seen similar effects with other live Linuxes on this machine.)

Anything I can try to aid diagnosis?

I have deliberately not put this in the Network Wizard thread as I don't believe that is where the problem lies. (But I am probably wrong!)

drongo

[drongo]

Rats, this was supposed to be part of the 4.1 alpha 5 thread.

Apologies.

drongo

[tempestuous]

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 118#222118

[drongo]

Thanks tempestuous,

I guess I can just manually load the driver and blacklist the deprecated one.

Just one question, though. I was running "puppy pfix=ram" as I always do on alphas. Why does the kernel select the wrong driver?

Regards

drongo

[tempestuous]

It's not a case of being wrong. The problem is that in the latest Puppy alphas there can be two modules competing for the same device. The best solution is to use the "PREFLIST" function, rather than blacklisting. I just posted instructions here -
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=32331

[PaulBx1]

So... will standard Puppy 4.1 be delivered with a PREFLIST already set up? It would be better to have drivers like this already sorted in order of preference so it will "just work" for most users. Maybe keep the less preferred ones around for people to try if the more preferred ones don't work?

The bcm43xx did not work on a Dell laptop I tried; probably it belongs at the end of the list.

Or are the questionable drivers simply going to be tossed?

[tempestuous]

You Broadcom wifi owners need to report your findings to Barry, and ask to have the problem fixed.

I don't think that PREFLIST will fully deal with this particular problem, because Broadcom wifi support since kernel 2.6.23 is now split across two different modules: b43 and b43legacy - obviously this means new/old devices. The pci id's claimed by each module should be completely different, but the old bcm43xx module will claim pci id's which span both of these new drivers.

So I think the best solution would be to completely remove the bcm43xx module from Puppy 4.1.