Weird Broadcom WIFI Bug

[zekemx]

Hello,

A friend of mine has this HP Pavilion dv6000 laptop that used to have Mandriva 2010.2 in it but he wanted to move to Mageia.
So yesterday I installed Mageia and found a weird bug with the WiFi driver

I first installed dkms-broadcom, rebooted the laptop and I later went to MCC Network & Internet / Setup New Internet Interface (LAN, ISDN, ASDL...) and added a new Wireless (WiFi) Interface:

eth1: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY.

Once connected the WiFi network drops every 15-20 seconds and then comes back again.

I got back to MCC Network & Internet / Remove a connection and removed eth1: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY and rebooted the laptop again.

Guess what?... The WiFi network was up and running just fine.. It connected itself automatically even if I had removed the connection before I rebooted.

So I thought there was something wrong at the begining, so I got back to add the WiFi interface again using MCC Network & Internet / Setup New Internet Interface (LAN, ISDN, ASDL...).. but guess again!!.... the problems came back.

If I have add an interface it fails. If no interface added it works just fine...

lspcidrake reports

wl : Broadcom Corportation|BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [NETWORK_OTHER] (rev: 01)

When this laptop used to have mandriva the WiFi network was working using nsdiswrapper.. I tried to make it work with nsdiswrapper using Mageia but I got a kernel error.. This is probably caused because it conflicts with the "wl" driver... I would need to remove dkms-broadcom first before trying to install nsdiswrapper.

So, until something is fixed with this driver or whatever is causing it.. I'll continue working with this latop the way it is.

Regards
ZekeMX

[zekemx]

I went to Mageia Control Center, network center, chose the WiFi network I am connected, configure, advanced, and chanced the DHCP client from "dhclient" to "dhcpcd". It also failed... I got a lot of drops again.

I later changed it back to "dhclient".

It's been days with out a problem...

I just thought someone would like to know.

Regards

[diego]

i had a similar problem, just that recently I couldnt use wifi at all anymore also not with a known working usb stick (zd1211)

i just fixed it by deinstalling networkmanager (not the drak one)

this also deinstalls gnome-control-center which i think is not so great.

will file a bug against gnome-control-center (cauldron) once i got enough sleep

cheers

diego

edit: i think theres also something wrong with excluding network connections from being managed by NM

[diego]

filed a bug: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2416

it seems no broadcom specific bug, as I had the same problem also with a zydas card

[llv_mech]

this happened with the wifes broadcom ... I solved it by changing the channel on the router .... no more dropped connections ...