BCM4321 WiFi not working in newer versions of Android x86

[Boris Gjenero]

I am running Android x86 on a Dell Inspiron 6400 with 14e4:4328 "Dell Wireless 1500 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card", which is BCM4321, handled by the b43 open source driver. It works in Android x86 6.0 r2. It worked in some Android x86 versions before that and has worked in Ubuntu for a long time. It doesn't work in newer Android x86 versions. I just booted off android-x86-8.1-rc2.iso without installing and couldn't find any wireless networks. In other versions it occasionally found one or two wireless networks, when it should be constantly finding more, but it was still unusable. Looking in dmesg, I saw "ERROR: PHY transmission error" messages. Comparing to working dmesg output in Ubuntu 18.10, I don't see any other difference. Loading the b43 module with verbose=3 did not provide more help.

Seems like this hardware should be supported by the closed source wl driver also, but I never got it to work with the wl driver.

[Chih-Wei Huang]

Boris Gjenero <boris....@gmail.com> 於 2019年1月10日 週四 上午6:26寫道：

>
> I am running Android x86 on a Dell Inspiron 6400 with 14e4:4328 "Dell Wireless 1500 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card", which is BCM4321, handled by the b43 open source driver. It works in Android x86 6.0 r2. It worked in some Android x86 versions before that and has worked in Ubuntu for a long time. It doesn't work in newer Android x86 versions. I just booted off android-x86-8.1-rc2.iso without installing and couldn't find any wireless networks. In other versions it occasionally found one or two wireless networks, when it should be constantly finding more, but it was still unusable. Looking in dmesg, I saw "ERROR: PHY transmission error" messages. Comparing to working dmesg output in Ubuntu 18.10, I don't see any other difference. Loading the b43 module with verbose=3 did not provide more help.

What kernel version is used in Ubuntu 18.10?

> Seems like this hardware should be supported by the closed source wl driver also, but I never got it to work with the wl driver.

Try to rmmod b43 and then modprobe wl.

--
Chih-Wei
Android-x86 project
http://www.android-x86.org

[Boris Gjenero]

On Wednesday, 9 January 2019 21:30:56 UTC-5, Chih-Wei Huang wrote:

Boris Gjenero <boris....@gmail.com> 於 2019年1月10日 週四 上午6:26寫道：
>
> I am running Android x86 on a Dell Inspiron 6400 with 14e4:4328 "Dell Wireless 1500 Draft 802.11n WLAN Mini-Card", which is BCM4321, handled by the b43 open source driver. It works in Android x86 6.0 r2. It worked in some Android x86 versions before that and has worked in Ubuntu for a long time. It doesn't work in newer Android x86 versions. I just booted off android-x86-8.1-rc2.iso without installing and couldn't find any wireless networks. In other versions it occasionally found one or two wireless networks, when it should be constantly finding more, but it was still unusable. Looking in dmesg, I saw "ERROR: PHY transmission error" messages. Comparing to working dmesg output in Ubuntu 18.10, I don't see any other difference. Loading the b43 module with verbose=3 did not provide more help.

What kernel version is used in Ubuntu 18.10?

Current version is 4.18.0-12-generic

 

> Seems like this hardware should be supported by the closed source wl driver also, but I never got it to work with the wl driver.

Try to rmmod b43 and then modprobe wl.

That is exactly what I tried. It didn't work when I booted android-x86-8.1-rc2.iso and I also couldn't get it to work in Ubuntu earlier.

[Cezar]

I have similar issues with Broadcom WL and my 2 BCM4360 and BCM4335 machines, latest known kernel to work and android version is nougat and kernel 4.8 with the bug of not connecting or reconnecting after sleep automatically.

I tried on oreo-x86 to fix/patch the driver for kernel 4.19, builds just fine, driver load but is not finding any network.

I also tried bliss branch of the piex86(couldn't fetch official pie-x86 to try) and kernel 4.9 and it has same issue, no network find.

Blacklisted/removed incompatible modules as per https://github.com/antoineco/broadcom-wl still no joy, I am kinda out of ideas atm.