I am having wireless issues on my Gentoo box. At first I thought it was the kernel having compatibility issues with the firmware source(couldnt compile without errors), so i rolled my kernel back with the help of a 32 GB thumb drive and Ubuntu since my Gentoo box had no network what-so-ever. I downgraded my kernel from 3.8.10 to 3.6.8 and then found that it was actually a broadcom issue. I had to enable broadcom support within the kernel. Either by make menuconfig inside of the linux dir or by manually editing the conf file inside /usr/src/linux/. I prefer the conf file to the gui. Way easier to navigate!

So on to the problem. I was not able to compile the compat drivers/firmware because of the broadcom issue. So once I enabled broadcom support in the kernel, the drivers/firmware compiled with no issues. i rebooted. But then i had some weird ifaces, wlp2s0 and sit0. Which to my knowledge are some kind of ipv tunneling.

I have tried to disable ipv6 in the kernel all together but still no wlan0 or eth0 iface.

I manually configured the conf file, then recompiled with -> make && make modules_install && cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-3.6.8-gentoo && genkernel --color --loglevel=5 --kerneldir=/usr/src/linux-3.6.8/ --kernel-config=/usr/src/linux-3.6.8/.config--2013-10-06--14-08-24.bak --mountboot --makeopts=-j3 --install all

ANY IDEAS CUZ IM STUMPED!!

Have you SSB enabled?

Weird one this: Sonics Silicon Backplane has a tiny Broadcom driver in it to make the devices on usb bus appear on the pci bus. I'm not a kernel head, and don't look this stuff up often, but that used to be the way.

Test: run lsusb and check for devices. run lspci and do the same. when you have them on lspci, you're sorted.