How to make working new Broadcom chips like BCM4331?

[Alexander Perechnev]

Hello everyone,

I’ve installed FreeBSD 10.1 on my MacBook Pro 13 mid 2012. Everything works pretty good, except wireless. It works with [ndis], but it doesn’t work with existing [bwi-firmware-kmod] and [bwn-firmware-kmod] facilities.

I’ve looked into [bwn] port Makefile (https://github.com/aperechnev/freebsd-ports/blob/master/net/bwn-firmware-kmod/Makefile) and found that all it does is just to download necessary firmware (4.150.10.5 and 4.178.10.4), extracts it via [b43-fwcutter-015] and compiles it into kernel module.

So the first problem is that 4th gen firmware does not support my BCM4331.

Also i’ve found the [siba-bwn], which recognizes the broadcom devices: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/sys/dev/siba/siba_bwn.c.

So summary it seems that it is not so hard to support my BCM4331. I have to:

- port [b43-fwcutter-018] to FreeBSD, because earlier versions doesn’t work with newest firmware
- update existing [bwn-firmware-kmod] to point it to newest firmware
- add my BCM4331 device to [siba-bwn]

I expect that after this steps my BCM4331 should be working. But I am new in FreeBSD and I’m just asking you for any help like related information, existing problems, links, etc.

I am not sure if I am right in my theory, but for me it seems that it should work. So if you know another problems, which I don’t, please let me know before I go through this steps.

Thank you for excellent operating system, now it’s my favorite one!

Best regards,
Alexander Perechnev.