Newest (2.6.23.4-65) release apparently breaks ndiswrapper, b43 seems to break NM

After the last kernel upgrade, which replaced the bcm43xx by the new, experimental, b43 Broadcom driver, I've been unable to get my wireless to work.

I've never been able to get my wireless connection to work "by hand" so I've been relying on NetworkManager and the knetworkmanager (I use KDE, not GNOME) to set up my connection.

I'd been running my 4318 using ndiswrapper rather than bcm43xx since it seemed to be somewhat faster and more stable, but the update automatically installed the b43 driver which, of course, rendered both drivers unusable. (Only one driver for a device can be running. Two drivers usually conflict with each other. [Unless the drivers are set up to use shared memory, which is quite uncommon.])

First, I did a modprobe -r b43 to remove the drive, added it to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and rebooted to get rid of it. This worked, and ndiwrapper once again could run my 4318 device. But I couldn't connect, since the WPA2 security processing seemed to be broken.

So I removed the ndiswrapper and set up b43. Everything seemed to work O.K. except that the NetworkManager could only run for a minute or so before crashing. If I an able to connect to my AP before NM crashes, the connection keeps running, and everything else seems fine. The problem is that the connection is established before the crash only about one time out of a hundred.

Oh, another complication: Restarting the NetworkManager when the connection is working closes the connection.

The problem seems to come from some application sending an obsolete D-BUS message to the NetworkManager. Here's what happens when I run nm-tool:

$ nm-tool eth1
NetworkManager Tool
State: disconnected
- Device: eth1 
----------------------------------------------------------------
 Path: /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/eth1
Type: 802.11 Wireless
Driver: b43-pci
Active: no
HW Address: 00:14:A5:89:31:41
Capabilities:
 Supported: yes
 Wireless Settings
 Scanning:  yes
 WEP Encryption: yes
 WPA Encryption: yes
 WPA2 Encryption: yes

Wireless Networks (* = Current Network)
 T.S.S.: Infrastructure Mode, Freq 2.412 MHz, Rate 62 Mb/s, Strength 61%, Encrypted (WPA WPA2) 
 cyber tool: Infrastructure Mode, Freq 2.462 MHz, Rate 62 Mb/s, Strength 35%, Encrypted (WEP)
 luksch: Infrastructure Mode, Freq 2.437 MHz, Rate 62 Mb/s, Strength 31%, Encrypted (WEP)
 kbrc: Infrastructure Mode, Freq 2.412 MHz, Rate 62 Mb/s, Strength 25%, Encrypted (WEP)

process 8384: arguments to dbus_message_new_method_call() were incorrect, assertion "_dbus_check_is_valid_path (path)" failed in file dbus-message.c line 1074.
This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library.
D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace
Aborted

I've made a bugzilla entry at Red Hat about this problem. but I'm hopping that someone could suggest some work-around.

You should know that ndiswrapper with the 2.6.22.X kernels needs to be version 1.48rc1 in order to work properly;

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=93482

Thanks, I'll give it a shot. What I have now is from the livna repository: mod-ndiswrapper-1.46-1.2.6.21_1.3194.fc7.i686.rpm, and that seemed to work well for 2.6.22.4_43.

[edit]
Well, that didn't work. The device is found, "scan" works fine, but -- when KNetworkManager tries to connect -- it halts with a "failed to connect" message after trying to configure the device.
[/edit]

Hmmm.........I'm replying using.............

$ uname -a
Linux Aspire5100 2.6.22.6 #1 Fri Aug 31 09:52:05 EDT 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ rpm -qa dkms-ndiswrapper
dkms-ndiswrapper-1.48rc1-1
(rebuilt using the freshrpms.net source rpm spec file)
Link: http://moonshine.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=419

$ lspci -v (sniped)
06:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

You will need the kernel-devel and kernel-headers packages installed. You may want to rebuild your kernel and use 16k stacks instead of the default 4k stacks F7 uses.

Well, I turned off all encryption on my router, and the connection works. So the problem is, I guess, somewhere in the wpa_supplicant / NetworkManager configuration. (Fortunately, the router's in the basement, so it's almost inaccessible from outside the house.)

Next I guess I'll have to try a "generic" wpa_supplicant profile.

OK, here's what I think happened. There was a wpa_supplicant update concurrent with the kernel update. When wpa_supplicant was updated, /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant.conf was changed to

# wlan0 and wifi0
INTERFACES="-iwlan0 -iwifi0"
# ndiswrapper and prism
DRIVERS="-Dndiswrapper -Dprism"

from what I'd had:

INTERFACES="-iwlan0"
DRIVERS="-Dwext"

and which is what I needed to get b43 to work.

Yea!!!! I'm glad you got this figured out, good for you.

FWIW, ndiswrapper stopped working for me too after the kernel upgrade, but adding the following:

blacklist b43
blacklist ssb

to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist fixed it for me.

I hadn't thought to blacklist ssb. And I'm somewhat surprised that your device works without a driver for the Silicon Sonics Backplane.

But, now that I've got b43 working, I think I'll let it ride. At this point, I've found little significant difference between the b43 driver and ndiswrapper, although the "power issues" with b43 would be worrying if I did much work on this laptop without being connected to the mains.