Broadcom wireless undetected in Fedora 27

Question

After a fresh install of Fedora 27, the wifi card is not detected after the running the first system update. After some lengthy troubleshooting online I am still no closer to the solution.

uname -r

4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64

lspci -vnn -d 14e4:

04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Limited BCM4356 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:43ec] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:0777]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18
Memory at f1400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32K]
Memory at f1000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel modules: brcmfmac, wl

rpm -qa | grep -e kernel -e broadcom-wl -e kmod-wl | sort

abrt-addon-kerneloops-2.10.5-1.fc27.x86_64
akmod-wl-6.30.223.271-15.fc27.x86_64
broadcom-wl-6.30.223.271-3.fc27.noarch
kernel-4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-core-4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-core-4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-debug-devel-4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-devel-4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-devel-4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-headers-4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-modules-4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-modules-4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-modules-extra-4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64
kernel-modules-extra-4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64
kmod-wl-4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64-6.30.223.271-15.fc27.x86_64
kmod-wl-4.14.5-300.fc27.x86_64-6.30.223.271-15.fc27.x86_64
libreport-plugin-kerneloops-2.9.3-1.fc27.x86_64

I have installed the correct kernel-devel package:

sudo dnf install kernel-devel-4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64

Along with enabling RPM-fusion:

sudo dnf install -y https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-27.noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-27.noarch.rpm

Installed broadcom-wl and kmod-wl

sudo dnf install -y broadcom-wl kmod-wl

Run the akmods command:

sudo akmods --force --kernel 4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64 --akmod w

Checking kmods exist for 4.13.9-300.fc27.x86_64            [  OK  ]

Run depmod:

sudo depmod -a

(No errors)

And finally modprobe on wl:

sudo modprobe wl

(No errors)

All without success. Does anyone know how to solve this problem? I have seen a few older threads documenting similar issues but none of the accepted solutions appear to work in my case.

Edit 1

After some more searching, I've discovered the kernel module I should be loading for my card is brcmfmac4356.

Running:

modprobe -r brcmfmac

And

modprobe brcmfmac

Produces no output but brcmfmac fails to show up after invoking lsmod. Checking dmesg reveals:

[ 8488.780453] brcmfmac: brcmf_fw_map_chip_to_name: using brcm/brcmfmac4356-pcie.bin for chip 0x004356(17238) rev 0x000002
[ 8488.782147] brcmfmac 0000:04:00.0: Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac4356-pcie.txt failed with error -2
[ 8491.291361] brcmfmac: brcmf_msgbuf_query_dcmd: Timeout on response for query command
[ 8491.291376] brcmfmac: brcmf_c_preinit_dcmds: Retreiving cur_etheraddr failed, -5
[ 8491.291383] brcmfmac: brcmf_bus_started: failed: -5
[ 8491.291398] brcmfmac: brcmf_pcie_attach_bus: dongle is not responding

I am not sure what to make of this but will supply a further update when I have time to dig a little deeper.

Edit 2 and ugly fix

I now have a working wireless interface by hunting down the allegedly missing file brcm/brcmfmac4356-pcie.txt here, pasting it into /lib/firmware/brcm/ and running:

modprobe brcmfmac

This feels like a hack and I have to wonder why brcm/brcmfmac4356-pcie.txt was absent. Is this a bug and the wrong file was being sourced?

While I now have a working WiFi connection I would very much like to understand the source of the problem.

Edit 3

The above fix is not persistent after reboot and requires me to execute modprobe brcmfmac before the wireless interface becomes visible.

Answer 1

I had similar problem with BCM43142 (you can confirm you have this card by doing: lspci | grep Network) after update Fedora 27 and later upgrade to Fedora 29. The problem lies in Linux-firmware. After the 20181008 upgrade of the firmware, wifi does not work anymore. Here are the steps I did to restore wifi:

1. sudo dnf downgrade linux-firmware
2. sudo dnf install broadcom-wl
3. add: exclude=linux-firmware* to /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
4. reboot

Note, if you just install broadcom-wl without downgrading the firmware first, your wifi connection will still appear. But when you attempt to connect, it will just keep asking for your password even though there is nothing wrong there.

Answer 2

I had the same problem when I upgraded my Thinkpad X260 from Fedora 26 to 27 (the chipset is BCM4356 too). I solved it thanks to this bug report at RH Bugzilla

• I downgraded to linux-firmware-20171009-78.gitbf04291.fc27
• I had taken before the same steps installing broadcom-wl package. I commented brcmfmac module in the /usr/lib/modprobe.d/broadcom-wl-blacklist.conf file so the module loaded automatically at boot. But I finally removed the broadcom-wl package as it's no needed anymore.

Next optional step would be to fix the linux-firmware version in order to avoid updates until the issue is solved.

Easy steps ;-)

1. sudo dnf remove broadcom-wl

2. sudo dnf install linux-firmware-20171009-78.gitbf04291.fc27

3. And edit /etc/dnf/dnf.com adding the next line:

   exclude=linux-firmware*

Answer 3

I had the same problem on Antergos/Arch on a Huawei Matebook with the BCM4356,

lspci | grep Network 01:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Limited BCM4356 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 02)

Issue started occurring a few months back after a kernel update however I'm unsure which one, but looks in line with then brcmfmac4356-pcie.bin was last updated (1841cec on 25 Nov 2017)

Copying your provided brcmfmac4356-pcie.txt into /lib/firmware/brcm/ resolved the issue for me after a reboot.

Answer 4

This guy got his BCM43142 working using his comment of this solution for the BCM4320.

Here’s hoping you get your BCM4356 working too.

Broadcom Wireless PCI Card BMC4360 14e4:43a0 cannot get drivers working