WLAN:BCM43227

This is a specialized trouble shooting how-to about getting a Broadcom BCM43227 WLan card to run under a modern (version 3.6.11) kernel. This card is not yet (January 2013) being supported by the open source module b43 as may be seen here: []

The problem: The ebuild module, that may be emerged using

produces a module that causes an interrupt exception kernel panic as soon as the necessary kernel options are included. The solution which is proposed here troubleshoots and uses the proprietary source provided by Broadcom.

The workflow was used successfully on an Acer Aspire 5750G laptop.

What is needed
The driver may be found at the Broadcom Site []. There is also a well-written README file.

Here is a successful set of kernel options. Might not be minimal.

The latter two appear to be needed in order to draw in the required flags WIRELESS_EXT, and WEXT_PRIV which are not directly accessible.

In addition it is probably necessary to disable

Lastly, citing the README, some modules need to be deactivated and blacklisted. Namely ssb, bcma, and b43. This can be done in

Compiling the module wl
While the before-mentioned README describes the driver installation process well enough, the make fails with an asm/system.h not found compiler error.

This can be fixed by editing the source file src/wl/sys/wl_linux.c

Both lines need commenting out (by adding two slashes // at the line's start). After this is done make should run through.

The last steps are as stated in the before-mentioned README: Copy the newly created file wl.ko into the appropriate directory

and activate the new module and the WLan. On the tested system this was at net.eth1