I have a laptop that has been running Linux Kernel 2.6.30 Gentoo-R8 (gentoo sources, don't remember which version) for a while. It has a Broadcom 4306 Rev 2 wireless card that has been working well with that kernel. I extracted the firmware from the broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5 blob a while ago using b43-fwcutter 011. I have to hard-code the network settings in /etc/conf.d/net for my home network, but am able to use wpa_supplicant whenever I go elsewhere. (I think it's my home wireless router that causes the issue; probably needs a firmware upgrade.)
Any how, I recently upgraded to Linux Kernel 2.6.34 Gentoo-R7 (gentoo-sources 2.6.34-r1); again using the b43-legacy driver for the wireless. However, now I can't keep a network connection up. I keep getting errors from the /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 startup - namely: SIOCSIFFLAGS Unknown Error 132. I had to reboot onto the older kernel to write this message and try to research the issue a little. >From on-line, some sites suggest the following as a solution: rmmod ath9k rfkill block all rfkill unblock all modprobe ath9k rfkill unblock all however, rfkill seems to only be in testing for gentoo (http://packages.gentoo.org/package/net-wireless/rfkill), and I'm using the b43-legacy instead of the ath9k driver - okay, no problem there, just switch out which driver is unloaded and reloaded. Haven't tried it yet as I have to reboot; but even so - they are saying this has to be done on every reboot, and that's not much of a solution. Further, I can't seem to find a version of b43-fwcutter that will extract any of the b43-legacy firmware - even the one I had successfully extracted (011, 012, 13). Has anyone else seen this? Does anyone know if this gets resolved (or made worse) by a newer kernel? Ben
