Advice needed Broadcom wireless packages

[Nicolas Viéville]

Hello Nicolas, 
>         I actually maintain the broadcom-wl and the wl-kmod packages.
>         
>         Since kernel 3.8.x, I had to face some impossible to solve
>         issues (rfbz
>         #2721 for example). To be more precise, the problems seem to
>         be located
>         in the binary part (blob) of the Broadcom STA wireless driver.
>         
>         I also posted Review Requests against RPMFusion for Broadcom
>         wireless
>         driver for bcm43142 device
>         (https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2550 and
>         https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2549). 
> Do these kmod will works with kernel 3.8 ?

Yes. Last comments in these review requests show it does. But these
review request are for a specific driver only for bcm43142 device.

The driver proposed in rfbz #2721 is an evolution of the one above and
last comments in this bug-report show that it works with kernel 3.8.x
and 3.9.x too.

>         While trying to solve rfbz #2721, I found on an Ubuntu PPA
>         repository a
>         new non-official Broadcom STA wireless driver that seems to be
>         compatible with Broadcom wireless devices. 
> I think it's problematic to have beta or non-official release into
> fedora stable.
> If it move the problem from a sure crash, to a random crash, it
> doesn't worth the effort to have it in stable releases.

I agree. But rfbz #2721 show that actual driver (5.100.82.112 in stable
release) gives a sure crash on certain configurations (notably Dell
laptop with bcm4312 device), while the proposed new driver (6.30.223.30)
with the same laptop gives (for the moment) good results (stable and
good speed) with last kernels (F-18 and F-19).

> What can be done instead, is indeed to hold the kmod into
> updates-testing to signal to the non-stable status of the driver.

Yes, my question was how to achieve such a hold, in case we keep this
solution.

> Also I wonder it isn't best to be back to ndiswrapper in some cases ?

Users report that some devices are not well supported, and that the
speed rate with free solutions is not as high as it should be (estimated
at half the one given by the proprietary driver). Some devices (notably
bcm4313 and BCM43142) are completely supported by the proprietary driver
(rate speed, led, etc. ), but are not supported at all by other
solutions (see
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Supported_devices).

> For now, you could state the different methods on the rpmfusion.org
> wiki and to point to the link from the RPM %description field.

Is there any advice that I should be aware of before creating such a
page in the rpmfusion wiki?

> Also worth to state this is to explain how to rely on the firmware
> extracted from the windows driver. instead of relying on the free 
> (this side should be handled in the fedora wiki actually).

I agree. The actual documentation in Fedora docs states that users
should "refer to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers for an
updated list of available Linux drivers" and post questions on Fedora
Forum about wireless drivers.

Finally, what should I do about the proposition I made (new review
request with new-not-sure-and-unofficial and
old-not-sure-too-but-official packages available at the same time) as it
seems that we are in midstream between the old and the new official
Broadcom STA driver?

Thank you for your responses.

Regards,


-- 
NVieville