Broadcom 4322, and wpa_supplicant [SOLVED]

justin_brody · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jan 2005 Posts: 283

Hello,
I'm trying to get Gentoo going on my new Macbook pro, and am having trouble getting the wireless working. Here's some basic info about the machine:

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2009 7:59 am Post subject:

If you compiled wpa_supplicant with the qt3 USE flag (and/or reportedly the qt4 as well), you will get a program called wpa_gui. This will give you the ability to scan for AP's, and to connect to them if they use WPA, and you know the passphrase. Give that a shot, and see what happens.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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justin_brody · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jan 2005 Posts: 283

Thanks for the tip!

When I start wpa_gui, I get a current status that says:

justin_brody · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jan 2005 Posts: 283

A little more info:
If I disconnect and then connect again, I get an intermediate error message that says "Association request to the driver failed". But then it says "Associated with ..." followed by "WPA: Key negotiation completed"

Still not getting an IP address though. I'm assuming the router settings are fine, because the same machine connects to the same router through OS X. Any ideas?

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 6:15 am Post subject:

You're not connecting fully. What you need to do is scan for your desired network with wpa_gui. Once the scan is complete, click on your network, fill out the information that wpa_supplicant requests, and go from there. Once you get connected, go to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. You will see an entry for the connection you just set up. Move it to the top, make sure you're set for dhcp, and reboot. See where that takes you.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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justin_brody · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jan 2005 Posts: 283

Hey Pappy,
Same behavior after reboot

. I'm noticing the CONFIG_SSB_POSSIBLE is set to yes in my kernel conf. Would that mess me up? I couldn't figure out how to disable it either - if I just changed it to "n" in the configuration file it would be back at "y" after a make. Don't know if that's the issue anyway though.

Any other ideas? [Thanks for all your help by the way! This is the second time you've helped me out - I'm glad that there's such a kind soul out there!]

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 6:15 am Post subject:

If you're using the b43 module, then ssb must also be a module. If you are using broadcom-sta, you do not want ssb. The ssb driver will mess with broadcom-sta.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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d2_racing · Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 11:10 am Post subject:

You should post your .config that is related with the wifi section.

justin_brody · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jan 2005 Posts: 283

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 9:35 pm Post subject:

If you're using broadcom-sta, change CONFIG_MAC80211=y to CONFIG_MAC80211=n. Broadcom-sta does not use the MAC80211 stack. It is possible it might conflict as well.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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d2_racing · Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 1:10 am Post subject:

In fact.

justin_brody · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jan 2005 Posts: 283

Thanks for the tip -- sorry to take so long to try it out. I took that out of the kernel, no change unfortunately. Seems strange, since i know other people have gotten this working with the same hardware.

I'm going to give up for now and try again in a couple of months

d2_racing · Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 9:20 pm Post subject:

Ok, no problem.

pappy_mcfae · Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2009 9:46 pm Post subject:

Someone will be here when you're ready. On that, you can depend.

Blessed be!
Pappy
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justin_brody · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jan 2005 Posts: 283

I'm back

Just did a fresh install of the system; same behavior unfortunately. I saw a recent post where someone had what sounded like a similar issue and fixed it by not broadcasting the SSID. I tried that but it didn't seem to help. I do sort of think that the association with the router is going o.k.; but somehow the dhcp part isn't working? The router seems to see the machine.

Anyway, here's some log stuff. The wpa_cli output was produced while I tried to connect with wpa_gui. Any help very appreciated -- I'm missing gentoo greatly

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 2:27 pm Post subject:

Hi, first your ip adresse is invalid :

hoacker · Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 2:47 pm Post subject:

justin_brody · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jan 2005 Posts: 283

Yes!!!! That worked!!!

Thank-you

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 8:19 pm Post subject:

Nice then

hujuice · Guru Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 336 Location: Rome, Italy

The solution made the job.
What's funny, for me, is that the hostap module has not been loaded.

Regards,
HUjuice
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wormite · n00b Joined: 05 Apr 2010 Posts: 19

After spending a whole week on this problem, I have reached the final conclusion of BCM4322 on my latitude:
The Broadcom people did a bad job regarding their 802.11n card's driver to work on linux.
For gentoo users here, this is the suggestion:
First, if you are using bcm4322, forget about current (<=2.6.31) kernel support of it, they don't, linuxwireless (google it) said they are still working on it, so I would guess 2.6.33 kernel has the same problem.
Second, forget about ndiswrapper. Currently the windows driver ported to linux doesn't work out of box with 80211n card.
You have only one choice, the broadcom-sta driver.
Its 5.10.xx version works, 5.60.xx currently is broken without the ability to do iwlist scan stably.
Now, if you grab any existing 5.10.xx driver from either suse or ubuntu, since the >2.6.31 driver got deprecated. (Ubuntu probably patched on its kernel to have their Karmic retaining the old 80211 thingy,namely net_device), the module won't compile till you patch the driver source at several places.(net_device and tkip part).
Now, with the patched kernel module, I have tested the module under two cases.
1st, home, wpa/wpa2 with tkip. Does not work.
2nd, school, wpa-enterprise with, obviously, not tkip encry. Works.

My conclusion here: change your home wlan to non-tkip and have a try, if it works, it works.
If anyone is going to play with this, post here and I'll post the patch of 5.10.xx driver source for >=2.6.31.(I didn't patch it very well for <=2.6.29, so I really don't want to let it out unless you are sure you have >=2.6.31 kernel)

I'll follow up my test of the 5.60.xx driver on school network.
Signing off,
worm

wormite · n00b Joined: 05 Apr 2010 Posts: 19

OK, consider this solved for me. I just tried at home, with wpa2 and encryption as ccmp, it is finally working, my wpa_supplicant file is as the following: