Broadcom-wl driver for a BCM4331

Support
1

Hello all,

First I wish to thank all of OM’s developers for bringing Mandriva alive!

I’m running OM Lx 4.1 Mercury on a MacBook Pro mid 2012 and all is working from installation to its use :sunglasses:

The only thing I can’t get is full speed with the internal wifi card which is a Broadcom BCM4331 as I couldn’t find a way to install the broadcom-wl driver (actually using b43 but this driver doesn’t offer 5GHz for N-PHY cards).

$ inxi -N
Network:   Device-1: Broadcom and subsidiaries NetXtreme BCM57765 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe driver: tg3 
           Device-2: Broadcom and subsidiaries BCM4331 802.11a/b/g/n driver: bcma-pci-bridge 


$ inxi -M
Machine:   Type: Laptop System: Apple product: MacBookPro9,2 v: 1.0 serial: <root required> 
           Mobo: Apple model: Mac-6F01561E16C75D06 v: MacBookPro9,2 serial: <root required> UEFI: Apple 
           v: MBP91.88Z.00DA.B00.1804091930 date: 04/09/2018
2 Likes
2

Welcome @rootweiler to OpenMandriva and our forum.

3

I asked about this on IRC developer channel.

IRC for users is #openmandriva @ Freenode IRC. You and all users are welcome there.

The broadcom-wl driver is proprietary so that may be a problem that OM can not over come. Edit: But I’m not sure about that. We are smaller and have fewer resources than Mandriva did. We are all volunteer, unpaid contributors.

4

Maybe this driver from broadcom would work for you.

5

Hello ben79,
Thanks for replying. I’ve downloaded the tarball but I’m clueless about what to do with these files.

Here are the listing of this tarball:

~/Téléchargements/broadcom-wl-5.100.138 $ ls -alRh
.:
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x 4 matt matt 4,0K août  13  2011 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 matt matt 4,0K août  27 09:45 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 matt matt 4,0K août  13  2011 config
drwxr-xr-x 2 matt matt 4,0K août  13  2011 linux
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt matt  292 août  13  2011 README

./config:
total 56K
drwxr-xr-x 2 matt matt 4,0K août  13  2011 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 matt matt 4,0K août  13  2011 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt matt  993 août  13  2011 wlconfig_lx_shared
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt matt  960 août  13  2011 wlconfig_nomimo
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt matt 1,4K août  13  2011 wl_default
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt matt  999 août  13  2011 wl_hnd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matt matt  30K août  13  2011 wl.mk

./linux:
total 36M
drwxr-xr-x 2 matt matt 4,0K août  13  2011 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 matt matt 4,0K août  13  2011 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matt matt  12M août  13  2011 wl_ap.o
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matt matt  13M août  13  2011 wl_apsta.o
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matt matt  12M août  13  2011 wl_sta.o

The README is of no help:

~/Téléchargements/broadcom-wl-5.100.138 $ cat README 
This driver was extracted out of the GPL source package for NETGEAR WNDR4500

It contains the Broadcom wireless driver 5.100.138
This driver includes firmware version 666.2

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GPL/WNDR4500-V1.0.0.40_1.0.10_src.tar.zip
WNDR4500-V1.0.0.40_1.0.10_src/src/wl
6

I don’t have Broadcom hardware. I would suggest that you ask someone in the Broadcom community or here.

Also Internet search.

'nuther suggestion is to contact your computer manufacturer and ask them if they have broadcom-wl drivers? Ask them what you can do?

7

If you want OpenMandriva to package broadcom-wl (if the license allows) you need to ask developers. I asked on IRC about this and did not get an answer. You could go to IRC yourself and ask.

There is a place in this forum to make package requests here.

8

I found this about installing the tar ball from Broadcom.com:

https://docs.01.org/clearlinux/latest/tutorials/broadcom.html

Go to the section “broadcom-wl”. Frankly that looks like it would beyond the knowledge level of most users. Maybe @AngryPenguin could do it?

So I filed a package request at our Issue Tracker about this also.

Package request for broadcom-wl. (User request)

9

Hi ben79,
I really appreciate all of your advices regarding my issue. I’ll try first to check and do steps on 01.org’s tutorial.

If i succeed, I’ll report back on this thread to mark it as solved. Otherwise, I’ll poke people on irc and as a last resort, I’ll ask a package request at OM’s developers if the license allows it.

cheers!

2 Likes
10

You might set up an account at our issue tracker and follow that package request. And then you are all set if you have any other issue that rises to bug report level.

Please do this. I definitely find that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I don’t expect the license to be a problem but it was mentioned I think on Github. Developers will know the answer to that.

11

Package request for broadcom-wl. (User request)

Packages are built for Rolling/LX 4.2 and Rock/Lx 4.1. The packages are currently in non-free/testing repository.

To install in Rock/Lx 4.1 for x86_64:

$ sudo dnf install dkms-broadcom-wl --enablerepo rock-testing-x86_64-non-free

To install in Rock/Lx 4.1 for znver1:

$ sudo dnf install dkms-broadcom-wl --enablerepo rock-testing-znver1-non-free

For Rolling you would replace the word rock with rolling in the command.

I do not have proper hardware to test this so all I can test is that the packages install. I did install this in a Rock/Lx 4.1 znver1 system.