John Mountcastle wrote: > I want to thank you guys once again for your advice, last week on my BCM4306 > problem. I've tried 20dBm, 15, 12, and 10dBm, with varying degrees of > success. Which, is just a fancy way of saying, no real success. > > I'm going back to the unpatched, 2-23 sources of last week to get to a known > state and will try the open source firmware which is reported to work with > b43.
Getting open-source firmware won't make a difference as firmware is not your problem. The main advantage is that the new firmware will have a GPL license and can be included with the distros. No one is expecting it to be better than the proprietary firmware. > If it doesn't, and frankly, I'm not hopefull, is there any way of going back > to bcm43xx. It'd be a shame to abandon a card which worked perfectly well, > before, even if it's not as open as we'd like. A lot of us are stuck with > this device in otherwise perfectly good laptops. The short answer is "No". With bcm43xx, the MAC layer was controlled by something called SoftMAC. It was buggy and limited, which is why it was replaced by mac80211. It would require a great deal of work to get SoftMAC to work with modern kernels. You could modify bcm43xx to work with mac80211, but then you would have the equivalent of b43 as that is essentially how b43 and b43legacy were produced. What I would suggest is that you build a 2.6.23 kernel and test bcm43xx that way to see if something changed in your hardware, or if it really is b43 that fails with your device. > One more question and i hope you don't mind, it's off topic but it's related > to my quest. I hadven't done any C programming in 10 years but when I used to > do a lot of it, if I patche a source file and ran 'make', it figured out what > needed to be done and just recompiled and liknked the changed bits. Over the > last week, every time I changed phy_g.c, make calmly repied, 'nothing to be > done.' What am I forgetting? That would indicate that your Makefile doesn't have a dependency on phy_g.c. Larry _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
