Broadcom BCM4352 detected, no wifi

Hi,

I just installed Fedora 33 Workstation and I am having trouble getting wifi to work. My wifi card has previously worked with Arch, Manjaro, and Ubuntu.

I’ve seen a lot of posts out there about difficulties getting Broadcom devices to work with Fedora, but none of what I’ve seen suggested has worked for me.

My card is detected:

$ lspci | grep -i broadcom
04:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4352 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03)

I ran dnf update then dnf install broadcom-wl then rebooted. It is still not recognized:

lo        no wireless extensions.

enp6s0    no wireless extensions.

eno1      no wireless extensions.

virbr0    no wireless extensions.

virbr0-nic  no wireless extensions.

I tried akmods --force and get an error. Does this mean I need to install a different kernel? I have kernel-devel installed and it’s the latest version.

$ sudo akmods --force
Checking kmods exist for 5.8.18-300.fc33.x86_64            [  OK  ]
Files needed for building modules against kernel
5.8.18-300.fc33.x86_64 could not be found as the following
directories are missing:
/usr/src/kernels/5.8.18-300.fc33.x86_64/
/lib/modules/5.8.18-300.fc33.x86_64/build/Is the correct ke[FAILED]el package installed?

Thanks!

Matt

Check

Fedora ships only free sofware. Binary driver blobs from Broadcom are excluded.

Did this include the following: paulfantom/jsonnet?

Thanks florian, I did see that thread and tried what was suggested without success.

But I was just able to get it to work! I didn’t have the same versions of kernel and kernel-devel and once I installed the same versions it worked.

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kernel and kernel-devel should always be the same version as long as your system is up-to-date. (sudo dnf update --refresh)

What sucks is the fact that kernel-headers is not rebuild with every new kernel, and compiling modules often fails. I have seen hundreds of issues resulting from that. There was a thread on the mailing list but it was decided that revuilding kernel-headers was not required with every new kernel. I see a lot of unhappy end-users just because of unmatching versions…

This may be well off-topic, but simply look at the user demand of matching versions:

https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=kernel+headers+fedora+rebuild+different+version&oq=kernel+headers+fedora+rebuild+different+version

Interesting. I will keep this in mind in case of future problems. Thanks.

So the problem is back. Wifi was connected and working fine for a few hours and then stopped working, showing that it was trying to connect. I confirmed the Wifi was on using a different computer. I installed wpa_supplicant from the copr repository dcaratti/wpa_supplicant, after which the device became inactive. I uninstalled that wpa_supplicant and installed the one from the main repo but it is not working.

My currently loaded kernel is

$ uname -r
5.9.8-200.fc33.x86_64

My kernel-headers version is

$ dnf info kernel-headers
Last metadata expiration check: 0:15:19 ago on Mon 16 Nov 2020 01:57:17 PM PST.
Installed Packages
Name         : kernel-headers
Version      : 5.9.7
Release      : 200.fc33
Architecture : x86_64
Size         : 5.1 M
Source       : kernel-headers-5.9.7-200.fc33.src.rpm
Repository   : @System
From repo    : updates
Summary      : Header files for the Linux kernel for use by glibc
URL          : http://www.kernel.org/
License      : GPLv2
Description  : Kernel-headers includes the C header files that specify the
             : interface between the Linux kernel and userspace libraries and
             : programs.  The header files define structures and constants that
             : are needed for building most standard programs and are also
             : needed for rebuilding the glibc package.

and I also have kernel-devel 5.9.8 installed.

Any ideas what I could try?

To use any akmod packages you also need to install kernel-headers. As has already been said, kernel-devel and the running kernel need to be the same. This is because kernel-devel is also updated with every new kernel update and the system never keeps anything other than the latest kernel-devel package. I have never had errors in building modules when headers are a different version and I build at least one video driver with every kernel update.

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