Broadcom wireless ndis 64 bit

[Bill Paul]

> Sam Leffler wrote:
> > Can you give me url's to these drivers; I've been looking for 64-bit xp
> > broadcom wireless drivers.
> > 
> >     Sam
> > 
> Sure.  I got the one at acer from jkim, but lost it and then found it
> independently...  Since neither works, at least in a compaq, I don't know how
> useful they will be except to figure out what that error code I get means...
> I gather that the one from acer works in some laptops, and fails with both
> ndiswrapper and our ndis emulator on others, and may work with linuxant's
> loader (I don't know as I don't have linux on this machine.)
> 
> Anyhow:
> http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/drivers.php, then find the obvious link
> (it is the first thing in the table).
> and,
> http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/portal.cfm?website=AcerPanAm.com/us&originwebsite=acerpanam.com&pupv=pu&formid=3394#results
> and about halfway down the page is an entry for Broadcom WLAN driver for XP x64.

Actually, it wasn't on that page as far as I could see, but I found it
anyway.

Also, in your original post, you neglected to include _all_ of the
dmesg output from your system. You included the part where it said
"ntoskrnl dummy called," which indicates the driver tried to call
an unimplimented function, but you cleverly elided the part that where
the PE loader said what those functions were. It would have been easier
to spot were it not for all the other verbose mode output.

Anyway. It turns out the two functions that were missing were trivial
to implement (Sam supplied a patch to add them). Go back to the Acer
site and get that driver again, and make sure to grab the latest
version of subr_ntoskrnl.c from sys/compat/ndis. It should work this
time. I'm running it with WPA mode on my Broadcom wireless PCI card
in my dual Opteron system at home right now.

Note: you will still see the "fpudna in kernel mode!" messages emitted
by the kernel periodically. It appears the Broadcom driver binary
is using some floating point instructions in the kernel. I'm not
exactly sure what those instructions are because I don't have an
amd64 PE disassembler utility. For the time being, the message seems
harmless. The driver seems to work anyway:

[/u/wpaul]:opteron.moo.com{6}% dmesg | tail -10
ndis0: <Broadcom 802.11g Network Adapter> mem 0xe0210000-0xe0211fff irq 31 at device 1.0 on pci3
ndis0: NDIS API version: 5.1
fpudna in kernel mode!
ndis0: Ethernet address: 00:30:bd:f5:ea:26
fpudna in kernel mode!
fpudna in kernel mode!
fpudna in kernel mode!
fpudna in kernel mode!
fpudna in kernel mode!
ndis0: link state changed to UP
[/u/wpaul]:opteron.moo.com{7}% uname -srm
FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE amd64
[/u/wpaul]:opteron.moo.com{8}% ifconfig ndis0
ndis0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        inet6 fe80::230:bdff:fef5:ea26%ndis0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x3 
        inet 10.0.0.9 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
        ether 00:30:bd:f5:ea:26
        media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (OFDM/54Mbps)
        status: associated
        ssid "test network" channel 6 bssid 00:02:6f:20:b3:e0
        authmode OPEN privacy OFF txpowmax 100 protmode CTS

Note also that the NIC really is running in WPA mode. Apparently,
when you query OID_802_11_AUTHENTICATION_MODE with the Broadcom
driver, it always returns 0 (open).

> Currently I'm using a different atheros (Netgear "dual 108" card; fbsd doesn't
> see the independent transceivers but it does work in a, b, and g mode.)  I hate
> using a plugin card when the machine has a perfectly good builtin which
> "should" work...

I agree. Give it another try.

-Bill

--
=============================================================================
-Bill Paul            (510) 749-2329 | Senior Engineer, Master of Unix-Fu
                 wpaul at windriver.com | Wind River Systems
=============================================================================
              <adamw> you're just BEGGING to face the moose
=============================================================================