I'm running macOS on a macbook pro from late 2013 but am reading the Arch wiki on wifi configuration and focusing on the first part:
the first part is to identify and ensure the correct driver for your wireless device is installed
My goal is to get a better understanding of how to figure out:
- What is the physical wifi device on my machine?
- What drivers do I need to make it work?
- Will it work with linux?
First I went into the "About this mac" menu to get some information about the network interface
(is that the physical network device?):
en0:
Card Type: AirPort Extreme (0x14E4, 0x112)
Firmware Version: Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (7.21.171.68.1a5)
MAC Address: 60:03:08:8b:96:9c
Locale: FCC
Country Code: US
Supported PHY Modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
Supported Channels: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 60, 64, 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 124, 128, 132, 136, 140, 144, 149, 153, 157, 161, 165
Wake On Wireless: Supported
AirDrop: Supported
AirDrop Channel: 149
Auto Unlock: Supported
Status: Connected
From the arch wiki it's recommended to use lspci -k
to get information about the wireless driver installed. The following example is given:
$ lspci -k
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation WiFi Link 5100
Subsystem: Intel Corporation WiFi Link 5100 AGN
Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
Kernel modules: iwlwifi
I think the two important pieces of information are the Card Type
and the Firmware Version
.
- What is the difference between the
Card Type
and theFirmware Version
? - Is the
Firmware Version
another word for aDriver
? - Which terms in the output of
lspci -k
correspond to the output from "About this mac"?
Looking through the existing Linux drivers and Cmd+f
for BCM43xx
turns up nothing.
However, following a link to the Comparison of open-source wireless drivers wikipedia page works:
There is some green and some red. Some questions are:
- How do I use this information to figure out if my wifi card will work?
- How do I know what driver to install?
- Is there a macOS
BCM43xx
driver and a linuxBCM43xx
driver? - Why does about this mac say all the
PHY
modes are supported but not the wiki page? Is it because they are different drivers?