Broadcom BCM4313 WiFi - Any progress in 2021?

M

McMoneysack91

Dear Friends,

I finally decided to go a step further and switch from Linux to FreeBSD. For that purpose I chose my little "experimental" noteboot ASUS eeePC 1001PX which apparently has a Broadcom BCM4313 Wifi PCI card in it. And here it begins.

I read through many threads and other forums in search for whether FreeBSD has any support for this wifi card. I found two fairly recent discussions from 2017 and 2020.

One stated (2017), that there unfortunately is no support in FreeBSD for this wifi module. Here is the link:

202501 – Add support for Broadcom BCM 4313 and similar devices

bugs.freebsd.org bugs.freebsd.org

The other (2020) is marked as (SOLVED) but the solution is rather disappointing. The threadstarter simply bought a different wifi module which was supported. In my book that is not solved, it is bypassed. Here is the link:
forums.freebsd.org

Solved - Broadcom BCM4313

Hello: the laptop I am working on for our local American Legion post, an Acer "Aspire One", includes a Broadcom BCM4313 WLAN chip on the motherboard. I am trying to get it in operation. I searched the threads on this forum and found an old one from 2012 which had some very useful info, but I...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

So my question is:

Is there in 2021 any possible way to get the Broadcom BCM4313 wifi card to work?

I come from Debian and with debian there are some problems with some hardware, too. However, Debian has its contrib and non-free repositories and with these activated there is not a single piece of hardware that is not supported. Is there such a loophole in FreeBSD, too? Can I activate some kind of proprietary driver/firmware repository?

Or is this specific wifi module forever doomed to never ever be supported by FreeBSD?
 
McMoneysack91 said:
Is there such a loophole in FreeBSD, too?
Click to expand...
Sometimes. It depends. Some hardware manufactures actually provide Linux drivers. Which is why you're going to find those in the Linux contrib and non-free repositories. Very few provide FreeBSD drivers.
 
It is disappointing when hardware doesn't work but there are loads of these things that don't work on Linux or macOS either. The manufacturers simply do not provide documentation or their own driver. Or there are thousands of (pointless) variants that the developers haven't caught up on yet.

Just get a tiny usb £5 dongle from one of the many Raspberry Pi stores, plug it in and pretend it never happened ;)

It is "side stepped" to an extent but in ~5-10 years time if you have a new laptop by then, you won't even remember or care what hardware you *were* running.
Not to mention, it is future proof. As the inbuilt laptop wifi stagnates, you can keep buying more and more modern dongles. I am at this stage with my inbuilt Intel Pro Wireless 2200. I almost wish laptops didn't provide inbuilt wifi. It dates too quickly and then drains power needlessly.
 
While my laptops nowadays only use Intel Wi-Fi, I did have a BCM4313 in a Dell Inspiron and FreeBSD 9.1-10.0 was a bit tricky. I did replace it with an Atheros unit, but in retrospect I should've have used a USB dongle.

You can use NDISulator if you are not on CURRENT, but better off get a USB dongle.
 
You've got to face the sad reality: Broadcom as company always sucks when providing/supporting open source drivers. This is not limited to FreeBSD only, also Linux is more or less the same.

So when you want Wifi on Freebsd - avoid Broadcom. It's that simple really.
 
Vote with your wallet and get a new card. The linux driver for this card requires binary blobs. This is not a FreeBSD issue, it's a "Broadcom doing the very minimum possible" issue.
 
In fact I had problems with this very WiFi card under Linux, too. Many many distros do not recognize it, no matter what I do. SliTaz Linux for example - no chance! Even Debian could get it to work with the non-free firmware support. A few Slackware based Distros managed the wifi card, too but thats it basically. What a shame.

neel I didnt look up your suggestions yet (pretty stressed at the moment). But does your post mean, that there IS a chance for my Broadcom card? From your post, I read that either using NDISulator or being on "FreeBSD Current" may solve my problem?
 
Maybe neel has had a different experience but as far as I know NDISulator only supports NDIS version 5.1. Meaning that unless you have a Windows XP era driver for your card, it is still a no go.
 
My laptop was using BCM4313 and I replaced it with Atheros AR9462 wifi card and it works very well. It supports 5GHz and 2.4GHz.

Screenshot at 2023-11-29 15-35-50.png
 
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