Broadcom wireless BCM4313

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Mon Oct 10 22:10:22 UTC 2016


On Mon, 10 Oct 2016 12:14:59 +0100, Olaoluwa Omokanwaiye wrote:
> Pls how can I get the above wireless card to be recognized and
> function on my FreeBSD 10.3

Even though "man 4 bwn" and "man 4 bwi" list several Broadcom devices,
your particular model 4313 doesn't seem to support those drivers (but
models 4312 and 4319 do). It might be possible to use the "NDIS wrapper"
port to load the "Windows" driver for the device.

This problem has been discussed and, as it seems, solved 5 years ago:

	I just downloaded the drivers on my Windows computer,
	extracted the driver files, and transferred the necessary
	ones (bcmwl5.inf, bcmwl564.sys, bcm43xx64.cat and
	bcmwlcoi64.dll, since I am running amd64) over to my
	FreeBSD machine using a USB memory stick.

	I then had to convert the files to FreeBSD kernel modules
	by using ndisgen, however, since one of the driver files
	was encoded in UTF-8 ndisgen required converters/libiconv,
	so that had to be installed first:

	# cd /usr/ports/converters/libiconv && make install clean

	All I had to do next was to run ndisgen and follow the
	instructions. I should mention that, for some reason, I had
	to run ndisgen from another directory than the driver files
	were located in, otherwise ndisgen failed to build the kernel
	modules.

	Once ndisgen had finished I ended up with three .KO files,
	which I placed in the /boot/modules directory. I was unable
	to load these files using /boot/loader.conf, so I ended up
	making a /etc/rc.d script which can be found here. Save the
	script to /etc/rc.d/bcm4313 and run:

	# chmod a-w+rx /etc/rc.d/bcm4313

	Done!

Sources:

Is it possible to use the Broadcom BCM4313?

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/26616/

Manually connecting to a wireless WPA-protected network.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/33728/


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


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