Broadcom Wireless Woes

Question

I think I have all relevant information in the link below, please let me know if there's anything you can think of, or some other useful information I should display. I have got this card working on arch/other distros before, but it's a struggle every time. Thanks
http://pastebin.com/SrghpUip

Answer 1

Thanks for the replies everyone.
I switched to the b43 driver, at the advice of Trilby. Now, I have been able to see wireless networks, but intermittently. I will run a scan with iwlist, or networkmanager, and will see networks, but running that same scan 2 minutes later and no dice. Not sure of the cause of the intermittent behaviour. I have never had wicd see a network, but I dont know if thats something with my card and wicd, or just a biproduct of the intermittent results.
Also, http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Dri … _b43legacy lists my card as being only partially supported, which is why I went with broadcom-wl initially. I didn't see where I could find what wasn't supported with this card.
Here are another round of scans/logs/information. Appreciate any further advice
pacman -Q | grep b43
b43-firmware 5.100.138-2
b43-fwcutter 018-1
lspci -vnn
04:02.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4321 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4329] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Netgear WN311B RangeMax Next 270 Mbps Wireless PCI Adapter [1385:7d00]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 17
Memory at f7ffc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: ssb
ip link
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enp2s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mode DEFAULT qlen 1000
link/ether e0:cb:4e:b9:05:1e brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: wlan0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN mode DORMANT qlen 1000
link/ether c0:3f:0e:bd:89:df brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
At this point, I saw wlan0 state as being down, so I ran ip link set wlan0 up, which returned back successfully, or at least without an error. However, re running ip link, the adapter state remained down.
iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
enp2s0 no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
iwlist wlan0 scan
wlan0 Scan completed :
Cell 01 - Address: 20:10:7A:06:FA:AB
Channel:1
Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
Quality=41/70 Signal level=-69 dBm
Encryption key:on
ESSID:"Pretty Fly For A Wifi"
... More to that network, as well as other seen networks. Didn't want to post all. Seemed redundant. Running that same command 2 minutes later, no networks found.
dmesg | grep b43
[ 2.668274] b43-phy0: Broadcom 4321 WLAN found (core revision 11)
[ 2.703956] b43-phy0: Found PHY: Analog 5, Type 4 (N), Revision 1
[ 3.297283] b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 666.2 (2011-02-23 01:15:07)
[ 3.384399] b43-phy0 ERROR: Fatal DMA error: 0x00000400, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000
[ 3.384403] b43-phy0 ERROR: This device does not support DMA on your system. It will now be switched to PIO.
[ 3.384405] b43-phy0: Controller RESET (DMA error) ...
[ 3.587254] b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 666.2 (2011-02-23 01:15:07)
[ 3.657348] b43-phy0 warning: Forced PIO by use_pio module parameter. This should not be needed and will result in lower performance.
[ 3.674913] b43-phy0: Controller restarted
No idea what the fatal DMA error means, and if I should be concerned by it, or if PIO is ok/good enough..?
Thanks, sorry for information overload, but more is probably better than less. Let me know. All comments appreciated.
On a semi-related note, anyone have recommendations for a wireless-n card that works out of the box? PCI preferred, PCI-e and usb also accepted. Lol.