wireless on HP compaq 6715s - Broadcom BCM5906m - not supported?

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 6 Jul 2010, Anton Shterenlikht wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 05, 2010 at 06:15:06PM +0000, Paul B Mahol wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Anton Shterenlikht <mexas at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> I've HP Compaq 6715s laptop.
>>> Looking at "pciconf -lv" output, the
>>> wireless (and ethernet) device is:
>>>
>>>
>>> bge0 at pci0:16:0:0:       class=0x020000 card=0x30c2103c chip=0x171314e4 rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
>>>    vendor     = 'Broadcom Corporation'
>>>    device     = 'Broadcom NetLink (TM) Fast Ethernet (BCM5906m)'
>>>    class      = network
>>>    subclass   = ethernet
>>
>> I see only ethernet, which is supported fine.
>
> Paul, thank you for your help.
>
> HP manuals describe it as "integrated wireless LAN" device.
>
> well.. this also puzzled me. The thing is, this laptop has
> a wireless button. When the laptop was running MS Windows XP,
> the button could be used to enable/disable wireless. There
> is a small LED on the button which lights up when wireless
> is enabled.  After I installed FreeBSD 9.0-current, the button
> is always off. I tried to press it during boot, while in BIOS,
> and after boot - it is always off, at least the LED is always
> off.
>
> So I'm thinking perhaps wireless is off on a very low level,
> and hence is not picked up by kernel?

Disabled in the BIOS.  Or maybe the button is an actual switch and 
physically disconnects the device.  Without the LED working, it would be 
hard to tell if it's doing anything.

The BCM 5906 is a wired Ethernet, attached as device bge0.  The pciconf 
shows no other network device at all.