Broadcom Wifi Driver Issues ; Can't Understand Errors, Confused

Question

Macbook Air 2017 13", Broadcom bmc4360 rev03 (14e443a0) card

Read the Arch Wiki on Broadcom Wireless and found "broadcom-wl" would work. Would prefer to use DKMS version, but have tried both unsucessfully.

( PS: Have installed BOTH iwd and wpa_supplicant . Would prefer iwd but neither are currently working because of driver issues. Mentioned this in case there are known issues of either one with my hw.)

Outputs of relevant commands are hard to provide exactly , since Arch is not connected to a network so I'd have to copy them by hand, so I have paraphrased them.

ip addr , ip link and similar : Only the lo shows.

uname -r : 5.4.98-1-lts

lspci -nnk | grep -i -A3 net: For kernel moudles it only shows bcma , not wl as it probably should, so I feel that the wl driver is for some reason not loaded ?

dmesg | grep -i firmware gives :

Spectre V2 : Enabling Restricted Speculation for firmware calls
ACPI: [Firmware Bug]: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored
acpi PNP0A08:00: [Firmware Info]: MMCONFIG for domain 0000 [bus 00-9b] only partially covers this bridge
platform regulatory.0: Direct firmware load for regulatory.db failed with error -2

I believe the last two outputs can be useful to people with a better understanding of this; I'm not quite sure what its trying to tell me and what I can do to fix it. If there are more commands that I can try that will help, please let me know and I will add the outputs ASAP if I'm online !

Some other bg info : I've been installing and configging Arch since last two days after school , have installed and configged to my liking, works with ethernet on my desktop , is prepped for my C and Python development, has no GUI (I have Ubuntu for that). Been doing development in and playing around with GNU/Linux for a year or so now smile This driver was an issue on my Ubuntu install too (from where I'm posting this) but was fixed by following an AskUbuntu forum answer ; by dpkg-ing what they call "bcmwl-kernel-source" , basically the same thing.

Thanks in advance , hope I can fix this.

Answer 1

I had also asked this at the Arch forums, link here.

Solution posted there by forum moderator V1del :

For the LTS kernel you need to install broadcom-wl-dkms and linux-lts-headers so the modules can be built against the kernel you are using.

That was all that was needed. Once -lts headers were installed dkms automatically did the magic , and built the wl driver for my kernel, and it works on my mac.

Note to others in the same situation : I remove wpa_supplicant , iwd 1.11-2 works well !