Mac Mini G4 1.5GHz Broadcomm bwi BCM4318 problems

[Nathan Whitehorn]

John Baldwin wrote:
> On Tuesday 22 December 2009 4:53:50 am Little Bhudda wrote:
>   
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I am trying to get the Airport Extreme (Broadcom BCM4318) to work  
>> under FreeBSD. This was working fine under Debian, but I'm having some  
>> problems getting it to work here.
>>
>> First of all, adding the line to /boot/loader.conf, as the bwi man(4)  
>> page says, did not give me the device. I tried to find the bwi kernel  
>> module, but couldn't find it. Maybe I was looking for the wrong name?
>>
>> Then, I decided to go for option 2 and rebuilt the kernel with the  
>> devices defined as mentioned in the bwi manpage. That went ok. I also  
>> built and installed the bwi-firmware-kmod as per the manpage's  
>> instructions.
>>
>> When I boot, the device gets reconised, but the loading of the  
>> firmware fails with the error message "cannot register image  
>> bwi_v3_pcm5, firmware table full!" after which the MAC init fails.
>>
>> A copy of the relevant entries in the /var/log/messages is attached.
>>
>> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>>     
>
> I suspect no one has tested bwi on ppc yet and that is why the module is not 
> built by default.  If you are successful in getting it working then it can be 
> enabled by default easily enough by editing sys/modules/Makefile.  The error 
> message you are getting seems odd.  The firmware table has room for 30 
> firmware images by default, and I find it hard to believe that you have over 
> 30 firmware images.  Can you fire up kgdb and run 'p firmware_table' and mail 
> the output?
>
>   
I use it on my G4 iBook, and it at least works better than that. I have 
a few reliability problems with it, where it will stop being able to 
transmit packets after a few minutes, but I suspect those are MI.
-Nathan