my broadcom b44 driver issue SOLVED

[Skidd]

I finally stumbled across the solution.
I know there are others here with this problem, so I thought I should post what I did.

I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a built in Broadcom 4401 NIC.
Wit kernel version 2.6.12 and previous had no problems working with this card.
But Kernels > 2.6.12 wouldn't work?!!?? Was it the kernel itself or my config?? Not 100% sure. I'm currently running kernel 2.6.13-r3.
The b44 kernel module would compile and load without any problems. It would even assign a static IP address correctly and appear as eth1. But no matter what I did, I could NOT get any TCPIP traffic through the card. My wireless IPW2200 worked perfectly, but the BCM4401 wouldn't? DHCP failed... ping failed.... it just didn't want to send any packets.

I searched and searched.. and searched for anybody with the answer. ... Nothing... Then I found a similar post with regards to using the ndiswrapper module with a different broadcom card. They suggested adding the kernel boot parameter "acpi=noirq". I figured what the heck.. give it a shot!
BINGO!!! That solved it. Adding that kernel paremter was all it took.

Now I'm running kernel 2.6.13-r3 with the build in b44 module and it all works.

Shane.

[AgtSkippy]

THANK YOU!!
_________________
Linux is not the answer, it is the question. The answer is yes...

[derheld42]

This may have been the location of the previous find: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=151898

I tried acpi=noirq and compiled b44 as a module and it didn't work with kernel 2.6.14.2..

So, next I tried compiling b44 into the kernel and using acpi=noirq on the kernel argument line and it still didn't work..

So, I tried removing any ACPI support from the kernel and tried the kernel options and that didn't fix it..

I noticed that the livecd 2004.3 (2005.1 didn't work on this computer for some reason -- maybe the burn was bad) uses kernel 2.6.9-gentoo-r1... That kernel has b44 v0.94 whereas the 2.6.14.2 has b44 v0.95 ...

Okay... according to the link above, I'm going to try upgrading my bios.
Finally I found bios information for my ASUS A7V8X here:
http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=de-de&model=A7V8X

I'm using BIOS Revision 1005 08/28/2002 and I'm upgrading to 1014 05/13/04... And what do you freakin know.. it worked!

As a final test, I'm removing acpi=noirq from the boot line. It still works.

Okay... one more test.. I'm compiling the acpi kernel options back into the kernel. It still works.