Debian – WiFi not working with Broadcom 43ba driver

broadcomdebiandriversnetwork-interfacewifi

I've installed Debian Jessie to dual-boot on a Macbook Pro 12,1. So far, I haven't been able to set up my WiFi drivers correctly. I've followed the instructions here in this way:

Found my chipset using the table on the documentation above.

BCM43602 14e4:43ba
Downloaded necessary .bin files by cloning the repository and moving the files for my chipset (brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.bin and brcm/brcmfmac43602-pcie.ap.bin) into /etc/firmware/brcm.

I haven't done the step that reads:

For SDIO driver you need to copy the nvram for your system and place it in /lib/firmware/brcm.

The reason is because I don't think the computer would be using the SDIO driver, but rather the PCIE driver. I'm not sure about this. A secondary reason is that I could not find the nvram file in /sys/firmware/efi/efivars after mount -t efivarfs none /sys/firmware/efi/efivars.

On rebooting, the driver appears not to be working. Any ideas?

Best Answer

The notes for the chip BCM43602 say:

Supported in 3.17+.

You probably have an older kernel. Check by running:

uname -r

If this is the case, update your kernel to >= 3.17 and everything will work properly.

Updating your kernel

You can update your kernel by adding jessie-backports to your sources list. Open up /etc/apt/sources.list and add:

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main

Save, then determine which kernel you want to install:

apt-cache -t jessie-backports search linux-image

Then, run the following, replacing VERSION with the kernel version.

apt-get update
apt-get -t jessie-backports install linux-image-VERSION

Related Solutions

Debian: Unable to activate wifi on HP Pavilion Dm1-4055sg (with Broadcom BCM4313)

I found a solution for my problem. I tested different drivers that were mentioned for the Broadcom Chip. The first success was a slow wifi connection. The thing is to have a look that sometimes more than one driver module can be disturbing for the driver. Driver modules can be unloaded with modprobe -r followed by the module name. They can be loaded by the same command without the -r.

Still the connection was slow. I found the solution on this debian wiki page. The driver described here is the vendor driver wl from Broadcom.

This one is seen skeptical by the debian community because it is not open-source and seems to cause problems sometimes. However it works good for me so far.

What I did was (as superuser):

$ apt-get update 
$ apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') broadcom-sta-dkms
$ modprobe -r b44 b43 b43legacy ssb brcmsmac   #That's where 5 unneeded modules are unloaded...
$ modprobe wl   #...and the right one is loaded this way

Note that non-free repositories need to be enabled. For more info see provided link (above).

Edit:

If anybody has the same issue: Be careful! I don't know if this is related to the previous problem, but one day later I try to boot the laptop and booting doesn't work anymore. I just get something that seems to be a kernel panic error. Maybe the two problems are not related, but who knows! Maybe this is one of the problems of the wl module why the debian community hates proprietary drivers.

Edit 2:

The two problems are definitely related. A possible solution can be found on this page. In summary the proposed solution is:

Make sure the interfering modules are blacklisted at /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-dkms.conf
Add hp_wmi, lib80211 and lib80211_crypt_tkip to the initramfs by writing them into /etc/initramfs-tools/modules.

This works for me, I guess. No problem since nearly one week!

Update 24.03.2014: Still no problems

Ubuntu – Wifi broadcom 4313 with proprietary driver (Ubuntu) randomly stops connecting to wireless networks

For the benefit of people landing on this page

There is a bug raised on launchpad

In the comment #29 there is a solution provided that is to reload the wl module:

modprobe -r wl && modprobe wl