Difference between 3.2.22 and 3.6.11 for Broadcom wireless?

audiodef

On my laptop, an HP ProBook 6550b, with a Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 01), wireless works with rt-sources-3.2.22-rt34 + broadcom-sta, but not with rt-sources-3.6.11-rt23 and brcm80211 (broadcom-sta does not work with more recent kernels).

What strikes me as weird is that I copied my .config from 3.2.22 to 3.6.11, tried to configure it for brcm80211 as per the wiki, and it doesn't work. I had to unmerge broadcom-sta to test 3.6.11, and then I noticed that my wireless worked anyway when I booted into 3.2.22 (maybe unmerging broadcom-sta doesn't remove the kernel module?).

Kind of stumped here. According to the wiki, I should be able to get my wireless working with brcm80211. Here are my relevant configs:

3.2.22

3.6.11 with config copied from 3.2.22

3.6.11 as I tried to configure it for brcm80211

I'd appreciate any advice.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 5:42 pm Post subject:

Unfortunately I do not have the same modem but I had many things break when I tried copying a .config from 3.2.X to 3.5+ on my HP Envy4 (using Intel wifi-agn) amongst other machines ... there seems to be significant option changes between these two but I couldn't put my finger on it exactly what changed. Possibly the rfkill/WMI keys stuff or 802.11 base config.

It would be good to triple check all options.

But besides that, are there any messages in dmesg about the card, is it really the fact that it couldn't find firmware? Is the driver not loading? Or loaded but cannot do anything?

(BTW, does your laptop boot up in Linux with the backlight turned off? That's really annoying on my laptop...)
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audiodef · Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 5:50 pm Post subject:

No, my laptop boots up with the backlight on. Do you have Device Drivers -> Graphics Support -> Backlight & LCD device support -> Lowlevel LCD controls and Lowlevel Backlight controls enabled?

I've been wondering if I should start with a fresh kernel config. I use Pappy's Kernel Seeds, so maybe I will do that and see what happens.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 7:24 pm Post subject:

Reason why I asked about the backlight is that apparently many people are seeing their backlights shut off during boot right as the Kernel DRM module gets loaded (and KMS enabled). There's a bug filed on freedesktop but so far most people have seen it on Intel built-in graphics on HP laptops only. Looks like you have an exception which is weird...
I've also had these options shut off for another HP laptop and it works fine, but it's an i915-based versus the Core i5 like the other reports of the same issue.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

audiodef · Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 7:40 pm Post subject:

I've never had this issue with Intel video on laptops. Weird.

I filed a bug for brcmsmac. I don't know it's a bug the way I know a rock will fall to the ground if I drop it, but I've tried everything by the book/guide/wiki/whatever and my hardware matches all descriptions but it fails to work, so I think the bug report is honest, at least. We'll see what happens.

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448218
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