[v35][x88_64] Mac Mini Wireless Drivers

[xstrex]

I've recently installed batocera on a Late-2014 Mac Mini; everything works flawlessly except for the internal wireless card.

Specs show that it's got a 802.11ac Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n backwards compatible) and Bluetooth 4.0 standard.

lspci for the wireless card shows bcm4360 chipset.
A quick search suggest that shows that ArchLinux supports the chipset.

Now I know from your wiki I can't just blindly install a package with pacman, as it relies on your batocera-store, and the repos it depends on.

My question is, should the wireless card already be natively supported, since it's broadcom, and a few years old, or should I go down the path of making my own package and adding it myself?

Cheers

[Hew-ux]

"My question is, should the wireless card already be natively supported," <- theoretically, anything supported by the Linux kernel is supported. Newer cards are usually supported by the "all-firmwares" package buildroot uses. For a 2014 device, it's pretty much guaranteed to be in there.

So, problem is likely somewhere else. Like a weird flag telling the chip to shutdown, or another OS holding the chip hostage. Or maybe it is that the 2014 Mac's Wi-Fi card is so obscure that no one has ever tried booting up a Linux-based OS on it and adding support for it specifically.

With such little information, all we can do is guess. Could you add your logs and support files? If you don't know how: https://wiki.batocera.org/report_issue

[xstrex]

Absolutely, thanks for the response, and direction.

[xstrex]

Issue: Wireless card in Mac mini (late-2014) not working with V35

Expected result: Working wireless adapter

Reproduction steps: Install batocera on internal HDD of Mac, attempt to browse wireless networks- none found.
Ifconfig only shows eth0 lspci shows bcm4360 wireless adapter. See (anonymized) attached logs.

Logs and data:
batocera-support-20230112162806.tar.gz

[dmanlfc]

@xstrex it's a known problem with the bcm4360 chipset used in the macbooks / mac mini.

I already did a PR for it - https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux/pull/7735/files

I will make a build for you to test & verify it works.
The problem is, the wl driver conflicts with some existing linux kernel modules so we have to blacklist them...

[xstrex]

Ah! That makes sense! Yea I unloaded the loaded modules and was trying different installed modules, but not getting anywhere; which led me to the archlinux wiki, and those wl drivers.

Happy to test, and thank you! Anything that helps the community/project.

[dmanlfc]

@xstrex here is the test build - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_bqmR7CoZ78i7DolYt5b-RRqB5c-LPyN?usp=share_link

instructions are in the readme to manually upgrade.

Once you have manually upgrade you will need to do this...

Via terminal, do the following...

cd /etc/modprobe.d
Rename this so that the .disabled is removed from the name - i.e. macbook-wifi.conf

• mv macbook-wifi.conf.disabled macbook-wifi.conf
  Also rename the file blacklist-wl.conf to blacklist-wl.conf.disabled.
• mv blacklist-wl.conf blacklist-wl.conf.disabled
  Afterwards type: batocera-save-overlay
  This will make the changes permanent, then reboot.

[xstrex]

Sweet, thank you!
I just grabbed all the necessary files, and will get this done in the AM. Thanks for throwing this together so quickly! I see what your doing in the manual-upgrade.sh also, easy enough (I'm a Linux eng by trade).

[dmanlfc]

@xstrex ?

[icypottle586]

Hi @dmanlfc, I have a TP-Link Archer T9E (which is a 03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03), tested both manual-upgrade.sh and the full image.

It doesn't seem to work in my case. I only see an IPv6 address under ifconfig and since my setup disallows IPv6 I get no connection there. Also SSID scan doesn't seem to work either.

I tried to hack it and add IPv6=off to ./etc/init.d/S08connman so it would add it to /var/lib/connman/batocera_wifi.config, and still couldn't get an IPv4 address.

[dmanlfc]

@icypottle586 did you do this...

Via terminal, do the following...

cd /etc/modprobe.d
Rename this so that the .disabled is removed from the name - i.e. macbook-wifi.conf

mv macbook-wifi.conf.disabled macbook-wifi.conf
Also rename the file blacklist-wl.conf to blacklist-wl.conf.disabled.
mv blacklist-wl.conf blacklist-wl.conf.disabled
Afterwards type: batocera-save-overlay
This will make the changes permanent, then reboot.

[icypottle586]

@icypottle586 did you do this...

Via terminal, do the following...

cd /etc/modprobe.d Rename this so that the .disabled is removed from the name - i.e. macbook-wifi.conf

mv macbook-wifi.conf.disabled macbook-wifi.conf Also rename the file blacklist-wl.conf to blacklist-wl.conf.disabled. mv blacklist-wl.conf blacklist-wl.conf.disabled Afterwards type: batocera-save-overlay This will make the changes permanent, then reboot.

Yes I did. Without doing those batocera_wifi.config wouldn't show up and there would be no wlan0 under ifconfig.

[dmanlfc]

Check your dmesg to see if there is still a conflict

[icypottle586]

Check your dmesg to see if there is still a conflict

what particular message I should look for? I remember I grep'd the output and saw only 1 wlan0 message (don't remember the exact, basically like "found BCM4360" or something of that effect).

[dmanlfc]

anything related to wifi
any lines with - b43 & brcm*

post a link to you dmesg file - dmesg > dmesg.txt

[icypottle586]

Looks like I lost my install and it's a different archive up at google drive...would you please reupload it with the bcm4360 driver? Thanks! :-)