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

Question

I have a problem similar to this:

Unable to get Broadcom wireless drivers working on Arch Linux

But in my case, loading the broadcom-wl-dkms driver did not work. I am new to this, so maybe the solution is quite simple (hopefully). What I did so far: I installed various drivers with yaourt and pacman, ending up with the broadcom-wl-dkms driver. When I list the available internet devices with ip link I still only get two results, the lo and the chipset of my motherboard (where the LAN´s plugged in and works just fine). With lsmod I thought I would get a list of all active drivers, but the broadcom-wl-dkms is not shown there.

What do I have to do in order to get the drivers all set up and running?

Ah, running wifi-menu gives me returns in bright red INVALID INTERFACE SPECIFICATIONS but I'm guessing that's just because it can't see any wireless networking devices.

I read quite a lot of posts but nothing really helped so far (And yes, I checked the Arch Wiki beforehand). Does it have something to do with the driver being restrictively licensed drivers?

Output of lspci -knn | grep net -A2 :

00:1f.6 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (2) I219-V [8086:15b8] (rev 31) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Ethernet Connection (2) I219-V [1462:7a12] Kernel driver in use: e1000e Kernel modules: e1000e

Fascinating: output of lspci -knn|grep Net -A2:

07:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Limited BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03)

Running lsmod | grep wl produces no result. How do I load the driver?

Answer 1

I finally got it working.

My working environment: 4.16.5-1-ARCH [rname -r]

My Desktop: GNOME

My Network-Env.: network-manager-applet 1.8.11dev+12+ga37483c1-1

My Wlan-Card: Broadcom Limited BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [14e4:43a0] [lspci -vnn -d 14e4:]

What I did: I looked at https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Supported_devices[/url:2j8cyqph] to find compatible drivers, which in my case turned out to be none but the wl package (install with pacman -S broadcom-wl). Make sure everything is up-to-date with sudo pacman -Sy, after that make sure your filesystem is all good with sudo pacman filesystem linux (which it wasn't in my case ;)). Check if your systems version uname -r && pacman -Q linux. Reboot. This already solved it, as the new kernel update brought some changes to

b43-firmware broadcom-wl nvidia

rmmod b43 b43legacy bcm43xx bcma brcm80211 brcmfmac brcmsmac ssb wl 117    
modprobe wl

did change nothing for me, but you can try /(as mentioned in the wiki ->https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_wireless)

You might have to restart Network Manager: systemctl restart NetworkManager.service What might have helped was installing linux headers: sudo pacman -S linux-headers

I don't know for sure what changed it to working, I guess it was the kernel update.