Problem with BCM4306 driver

Atanas Atanasov thenasko at gmail.com
Sun May 28 08:39:32 PDT 2006


I have a HP nx6110 laptop, and decided to install FreeBSD 6.1. Quite
frankly I am surprised by the power and fine design this system has.
This is definitely a better server than linux. I am a complete newbie
in BSD, so please excuse me if my question sounds very stupid.

I am trying to make my integrated wireless card Broadcom 4306 work.
Since there are no native drivers I adopted the ndis approach. Howevet
there seem to be two ways to do this, one is using ndiscvt and the
other with ndisgen. I tried both but none worked:

1. USING ndiscvt
I copied the driver to /sys/modules/if_ndis, and then:
# ndiscvt -i BCMWL5A.INF -s BCMWL5.SYS -o ndis_driver_data.h
# make && make install
# kldload ndis && kldload if_ndis
However I am not seeing the interface when run ifconfig. It behaves as
if nothig is there. I also tried to recompile ndis & if_ndis from
their sources in /usr/src/sys/modules but nothing worked. The adapter
simple does not appear. However when I run pciconf -lv I see the pci
card.

2. USING ndisgen
I copied the drivers to the same folder and run ndisgen BCMWL5.INF
BCMWL5.SYS. Everything goes ok but I get an error in the last step
when I try to compile it. Then I tried to redirect the output if
ndisgen to a pipe and it miracolously generated a file BCMWL5_SYS.
This I copied to /boot/kernel and loaded ndis, if_ndis, BCMWL5_SYS.
However again the adapter does not appear in ifconfig.

I cannot see what is going wrong, because I just followed some HOWTOs
that appear in the FreeBSD Handbook (of ndiscvt) and some other forum
(about ndisgen). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Atanas


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