Operating systems

Is that combo really impossible?

I've been running Linux in multiple old/oldish laptops. Broadcom is such a popular chip vendor, it is the most typical choice regardless of the laptop manufacturer. As Broadcom is full of idiots, their device drivers are proprietary. In their infinte wisdom, they pre-build Linux binaries and hand them out. This, obviously, is much better than not having the closed-source driver package at all. However, they really don't care. Every once in a while something happens in Linux kernel and their driver becomes less-than-operational.

Also, by lack of one official source, there are number of packages made out of the binary distribution. Key naming convention will include letters W and L in them, so you as an end user have to know wl stands for Broadcom BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4313, BCM4321, BCM4322, BCM43224, BCM43225, BCM43227, BCM43228, BCM43142, BCM4331, BCM4352, BCM4360 devices. Simple! (No, not simple)
As an example: Fedora doesn't support Broadcom at all (as default), Arch Linux has packages brcm80211, b43 and broadcom-wl, Debian has  broadcom-wl as non-free package.

Recently my Fedora 40 refused to find a working Wifi. It all started on from 6.9.10 up to 6.10.5. Oh, I forgot to mention, altough Fedora doesn't have the support, there exist number of alternative RPM-repos for Fedora carrying Broadcom. An example, RPM Fusion., non-free package of broadcom-wl. To make this mess even messier, RPM Fusion also has kmod-wl and akmod-wl.

Ok, many packages, back to the problem: my laptop lost Wifi and I really struggled to figure out why, which kernel module caused the problem and for what reason. At the time both broadcom-wl and kmod-wl were installed.

This is VERY confusing! You have to be super-smart to understand much of my less-than-coherent story above. Unfortunately, that is the reality. Everything gets convoluted, confusing and chaos.

In RPM Fusion Bugzilla, there is a bug #6991 Kernel hangs due to broadcom wifi driver. This bug report is specifically for akmod-wl, which was not installed in my laptop. Using an USB-dongle, uninstalling both broadcom-wl and kmod-wl, followed by installing akmod-wl did not solve the problem either. Unlike with original packages, with akmod-wl there was no kernel crash on modprobe. With this package NetworkManager didn't work either. Weird.

When I wrote comments to bug report and Mr. Vieville, author of akmod-wl, replied with a suggestion. There existed an unreleased version of 6.30.223.271-53. Little bit of dnf installing and testing ... it works! Now my laptop had native Wifi-connectivity and I could un-plug the USB-dongle.

This incident left me really confused and happy.