[FC-6 x86_64] Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 woes
 

Hello. First time posting here but figured I'd give it a shot since I've not had luck yet elsewhere ...

I just bought HP dv2120 laptop which has a broadcom wireless card (lspci -vvv and -n output below). I did a fresh install of FC-6 GOLD x86_64, kernel is 2.6.18-1.2798 and everything seems to work great except the wireless. From my googling it appears that this card should be supported by the bcm43xx module. I've read the bcm43xx HOWTO in fedoraforum, as well as the excellent HOWTO David Woodhouse x-posted to the fedora lists, however no luck thus far. The bcm43xx module loads just fine, no errors in syslog or dmesg. I've tried a handful of the drivers listed in the bcm43xx-fwcutter README, and the fwcutter tool seems to extract the firmware fine. But NetworkManager isn't seeing any wireless devices, and attempting to manually bring up the interface also states that the device isn't present:

[dave@smithers ~]$ ifup eth1
bcm43xx device eth1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

Is this possibly related to running the x86_64 spin of FC6? I'm considering doing an x86 install but would prefer not to as I really was hoping to run 64-bit on this laptop.

I'm not sure how to further troubleshoot this problem. Any/all advice is greatly appreciated!

~Homer~

-----
01:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-PCI Card (rev 01)
Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device 1363
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 10
Region 0: Memory at c3000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=375mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=2 PME-
Capabilities: [58] Message Signalled Interrupts: 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
Address: 00000000 Data: 0000
Capabilities: [d0] Express Legacy Endpoint IRQ 0
Device: Supported: MaxPayload 128 bytes, PhantFunc 0, ExtTag+
Device: Latency L0s <4us, L1 unlimited
Device: AtnBtn- AtnInd- PwrInd-
Device: Errors: Correctable- Non-Fatal- Fatal- Unsupported-
Device: RlxdOrd- ExtTag- PhantFunc- AuxPwr- NoSnoop-
Device: MaxPayload 128 bytes, MaxReadReq 128 bytes
Link: Supported Speed 2.5Gb/s, Width x1, ASPM L0s, Port 0
Link: Latency L0s <4us, L1 <64us
Link: ASPM Disabled RCB 64 bytes CommClk- ExtSynch-
Link: Speed 2.5Gb/s, Width x1
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [13c] Virtual Channel
-----
[dave@smithers ~]$ lspci -n
01:00.0 0280: 14e4:4311 (rev 01)

To tell you the truth the bcm43xx module for x86_64 systems is not reliable (32-bit systems are not much better), it is better to use the ndiswrapper module from livna instead and blacklist the bxm43xx module.

http://rpm.livna.org/
http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/x86_64....2798.fc6.html

To blacklist the module as root using your choice of text editor modify the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file and add something like (at the end of the file);

# wireless drivers
blacklist bcm43xx

I wanted to quickly follow-up on this post for the benefit of anybody else who has this broadcom card ...

I received word from 1 of the lead wireless guys that this card is PCI Express which isn't supported in the stock FC-6 kernels. He pointed me to his latest test kernel which has a patch to add support for PCI-E broadcom cards, and this does get things working, somewhat.

URL: people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/fc6

I'm still having troubles getting the card to work reliably, but progress is definitely being made. The current status can be followed in this BugZilla report:

URL: bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=213556

Cheers,
~Homer~