b43 the first Linux driver supporting HT-PHY (BCM4331)!

2011/8/27 James Anslow <[email protected]>:

Quoted 56 lines · Rafa? Mi?ecki

Quoted 45 lines

2011/8/27 James Anslow <[email protected]>:

Quoted 33 lines · Rafa? Mi?ecki

Quoted 23 lines

After improving DMA (the important patch for BCM4331 is my one) we can finally enable support for HT-PHY. The whole code has been written from MMIO dumps grabbed from ndiswrapper+windows driver, but seems to be stable and was tested by 3 people. Unfortunately there are still some missing conditions that can't be fixed without RE the closed driver or having Broadcom co-operating. However it seems we live with that well enough for basic usage :)

BCM4331 doesn't have any Linux driver yet, both: wl and brcm80211 don't support it. So we can be really proud of it ;) Ah, and I should mention that ndiswrapper was frequently reported to lock up machines when working with this card (see Ubuntu's forum about MacBook 8.1).

To use b43 with BCM4331 you will need to grab the newest b43-fwcutter and extract firmware from some recent closed source driver. See our wiki page in few hours for nice howto.

Big thanks go to David Woodhouse for providing me access to his MacBook, letting grab the dumps, test patches and debugging a lot of hard cases with me (and sometime without ;) ).

Larry Finger (1):
b43: Relax requirement for descriptors to be in the DMA zone

Quoted 9 lines

Rafa? Mi?ecki (2):
b43: use 8K buffers for 64-bit DMA to workaround hardware bug
b43: make HT-PHY support experimental

 drivers/net/wireless/b43/Kconfig |    6 +++---
 drivers/net/wireless/b43/dma.c   |   31 ++++++++++++++++---------------
 drivers/net/wireless/b43/dma.h   |    3 ++-
 3 files changed, 21 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)

Quoted 7 lines

I've checked the wiki page and downloads area but the latest version of fwcutter that I could find was from several days ago.

Can anyone direct me towards the latest b43-fwcutter download as mentioned above?

Can't wait to get 4331 support!

Just use the howto for kernel 3.2 (I know it's a little tricky for now to use 3.2, wireless-next is also OK for that howto):
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Other_distributions_not_mentioned_above

Quoted 8 lines

You have to:
1) Clone git repository wireless-next
2) Apply 3 patches from this patchset
3) Compile kernel with B43_PHY_HT
4) Install firmware (I think you already started that part)

b43-fwcutter in 015 version is alright for extracting 666.2 firmware.

Thanks for your support on this.

Quoted 7 lines

I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to kernel development. However, I am eager to learn.

I've cloned the repo and have wireless-next.

Can you tell me where I will find these 3 patches to apply them to wireless-next?

You can find them on b43-dev ML archive. You can copy them and paste into 3 separated text files.

However to make it easier to you, I've also uploaded them to http server:
http://files.zajec.net/enable-ht/0001-b43-Relax-requirement-for-descriptors-to-be-in-the-D.patch
http://files.zajec.net/enable-ht/0002-b43-use-8K-buffers-for-64-bit-DMA-to-workaround-hard.patch
http://files.zajec.net/enable-ht/0003-b43-make-HT-PHY-support-experimental.patch

Save all that 3 files on your disk and then do:

cd /foo/bar/wireless-next
git am 0001-b43-Relax-requirement-for-descriptors-to-be-in-the-D.patch git am 0002-b43-use-8K-buffers-for-64-bit-DMA-to-workaround-hard.patch git am 0003-b43-make-HT-PHY-support-experimental.patch

After that use "make menuconfig", enable BCMA, enable support for BCMA in b43 and enable HT support in b43.