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Topic: WRT54GL / Broadcom status

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Hi,

I come here once in a while to figure out the status of the Broadcom driver that would enable Linksys WRT54GL devices to run Kamikaze.
Since I haven't seen anything recently, could someone please say a few words on what can be expected realistically?

Cheers,

Tom

Hi Tom,

I pretty much don't understand your question.  The Broadcom wl.o works just fine.  The only thing that doesn't work (and it'S my personal PITA) is the combination of wpa_supplicant (WPA Enterprise Client) and wl.o ... and I guess this won't work until broadcom releases a driver source ... which probably won't happen anytime soon ...

Cheers,
St0fF

St0fF wrote:

The only thing that doesn't work (and it'S my personal PITA) is the combination of wpa_supplicant (WPA Enterprise Client) and wl.o ... and I guess this won't work until broadcom releases a driver source ... which probably won't happen anytime soon ...

Cheers,
St0fF

Hi!
Do you know about opensource broadcom driver and wpasupplicant?
Could that work?

Alex

Sorry for the late reply - I don't show up too often here...

Maybe I was a little uninformative (or, even more possible, uninformed). My goal is to use the WRT54GL in Access Point mode, with WPA2 + PSK for security. I do not need Radius, PSK is just fine, but all my previous experiences showed that WPA2 does not seem to work, neither with nas nor with wpa_supplicant.

Do I take your words right that nas should work fine now on 2.6?

Cheers,
Tom

Broadcom's proprietary wl driver and nas binary only work on 2.4 kernels.  When using the wl driver you should never use wpa_supplicant, nas fills that role.

On 2.6 kernels the only option is the open source bcm43xx drivers.  While progress is being made, they still aren't nearly stable enough used.  With these drivers, wpa_supplicant and hostapd are used for WPA encryption (TKIP/RADIUS/etc.) but again, it will require more work for them to be considered usable.

Wireless on routers using Broadcom chipsets does work on the brcm-2.4 target.  WPA2 should work fine, not sure why it did not work for you.

KB893357 is obsolete, the latest is KB917021.

St0fF wrote:

Hi Tom,
I pretty much don't understand your question.  The Broadcom wl.o works just fine.

No it's not. I installed the brm-2.4 snapshot of 04/03/2007 on a wrt54gl router and the wireless device is not detected. This is the output of iwconfig:
root@OpenWrt:/# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth0.0    no wireless extensions.

eth0.1    no wireless extensions.

br-lan    no wireless extensions.

root@OpenWrt:/#

and this is the one from ifconfig:

root@OpenWrt:/# ifconfig
br-lan    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:39:BC:2B:E3 
          inet addr:192.168.1.1  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:180 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:100 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:11123 (10.8 KiB)  TX bytes:9047 (8.8 KiB)

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:39:BC:2B:E3 
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:178 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:306 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:14947 (14.5 KiB)  TX bytes:81163 (79.2 KiB)
          Interrupt:4

eth0.0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:39:BC:2B:E3 
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:180 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:100 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:11843 (11.5 KiB)  TX bytes:9447 (9.2 KiB)

eth0.1    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:18:39:BC:2B:E3 
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:202 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:65246 (63.7 KiB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback 
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

root@OpenWrt:/#

and it's to be sure that it's kamikaze brm-2.4:
root@OpenWrt:/# uname -a
Linux OpenWrt 2.4.34 #2 Sun Mar 4 15:19:01 GMT 2007 mips unknown
root@OpenWrt:/#

Does anybody know how to make the wireless device working?

Thanks

Goshawk wrote:

Does anybody know how to make the wireless device working?

Probably you did not select the proper drivers (wl) when configuring the brcm-2.4 target.

Goshawk:

I had the same issue on my wrt54gl using kamikaze and kernel 2.4.34.  My issue showed the same simptoms as yours. Upon closer inspection I found this line in dmesg:

No Broadcom devices found.

I did "lsmod |grep wl" and also saw that the module was not loaded.

When I went to try and load the module "insmod wl.o" it gave me an error that it was compiled for a different kernel.

"strings wl.o |grep version" returned:
kernel_version=2.4.20
kernel_version=2.4.34

Woops. there are two kernel versions listed in the module.. I don't know if that should be correct but I really doubt it....

So seen how it mentions my kernel, I did "insmod -f wl.o" this forced the wl.o driver to be loaded disregarding the kernel version issue.

Also do "insmod wlcompat"

Then I filled the /etc/config/wireless file according to the documetation and restarted my network.. "/etc/init.d/network restart"

then if you do "ifconfig" you will see wl0 listed.

ALso you can check dmesg:
wl0: Broadcom BCM4320 802.11 Wireless Controller 4.80.53.0

and lsmod will show wl.o

thanks for your answer.

I solved the problem using another image after some days (a compiled snapshot image) and it worked, then i fixed a problem with multiple essid and client mode under wpa that you can find at http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=9980

thanks

Do you know what version that you used?  I am currently having to used the insmod -f command to load the wl.o driver... I checked out the latest trunk as of last night, and still with the same error... All my other modules compiled with the correct kernel version, but the wl.o keeps getting both kernel versions added.

I guess I will have to open a new post and see if a developer can help me figure it out....


Glad you got it working.

William.

The image that i'm using is:
KAMIKAZE (bleeding edge, r6529)
it was under the bcm-2.4 folder.

With this image also wpa in client mode works...

St0fF wrote:

The Broadcom wl.o works just fine.  The only thing that doesn't work (and it'S my personal PITA) is the combination of wpa_supplicant (WPA Enterprise Client) and wl.o ... and I guess this won't work until broadcom releases a driver source ... which probably won't happen anytime soon ...

Is there any OpenWRT supported device on the market today that can run wpa_supplicant?

Regards,

George

seeing my experience with openwrt, wpa_supplicant does not work with wl driver.
You should use NAS instead that it quite simple to use:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/nas

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