Help needed for BCM 4311 WiFi card in Dell INSPIRON 6400 Laptop

Hi,

this is my first post here, so don't kill me immediately if my post is against the rules.

I have an older DELL Laptop, an INSPIRON 6400 with a BCM 4311 WiFi card. I installed FreeBSD-13.0 on a blank, new ssd and the kernel identified the driver for the wifi card as a bci driver. With the freebsd handbook it was very easy to bring the laptop online in my wpa-secured home network. But: The connection is not stable. When I download bigger files (> 1 MB) the wifi led goes off and on again and it takes several seconds to continue the download for a few more MBs. So, it works, but with a lot of iterruptions. Next I updated the ports tree and installed the firmware for bwi and bwn. But the result remained the same, no difference.

This is my /boot/loader.conf:
Code:
bwi_v3_ucode_load="YES"
if_bwi_load="YES"
wlan_ccmp_load="YES"
wlan_tkip_load="YES"

My /etc/rc.conf looked like this:
Code:
clear_tmp_enable="YES"
hostname="inspiron"
create_args_wlan0="country DE"
sshd_enable="YES"
ntpd_enable="YES"
dbus_enable="YES"
wlans_bwi0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA SYNCDHCP"
wpa_supplicant_enable="YES"

The error message appearing on the screen everytime the wlan led goes off is

Code:
bwi0: bwi_intr: intr PHY TX error
bwi0: bwi_restart bwgin, help!
bwi0: firmware rev 0x0127, patch level 0x000e
wpa_supplicant: Failed to add supported operating classes IE
bwi0: need multicast update callback
bwi0: need multicast update callback

So I consulted the driver specifications of bwi and bwn and found out, that allthough the kernel loaded the bwi driver, the bwn driver would be the right one. So I replaced all occurences of bwi in both files by bwn and the firmware file bwi_v3_ucode_load by bwn_v4_lp_ucode_load.

/boot/loader.conf:
Code:
bwi_v4_lp_ucode_load="YES"
if_bwn_load="YES"
wlan_ccmp_load="YES"
wlan_tkip_load="YES"

But now things even got worse: The driver can't find it's firmware files!
Code:
bwn0: ucode fw: ucode5
bwn_v4_ucode5: could not load firmware image, error 2
bwn0: the fw file(bwn_v4_ucode5) not found
bwn0: ucode fw: ucode5
bwn-open_v4_ucode5: could not load firmware image, error 2
bwn0: the fw file(bwn-open_v4_ucode5) not found
.................... giving up

So I have no wifi at all with the bwn driver. But: During the make install of the bwn driver in the ports tree I could see, that these files had been built and hopefully linked inside the driver.

Where's my mistake?

Thanks in advance
Vlatiha
 
Only the firmware is, not the driver. The driver (bwn(4)) is included with FreeBSD.


Wrong one? Shouldn't this be bwn_v4_ld_ucode_load?
You're right. Typo here in the post as I can't write on the freebsd laptop due to the connection errors.

So, the "make install" in net/bwn-firmware-kmod copied a lot of drivers in /boot/modules and among that bwn_v4_lp_ucode.ko but no ucode5 or something. Where do I get that from?

Thanks
Vlatiha
 
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