Odd behavior of ssb, b43, b43legacy, and b44

[Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>]

Michael,

On one of my boxes, I have installed two PCI-format BCM43xx cards for testing.
One is a BCM4306 Rev. 3, which uses b43. The other is a BCM4303, which uses
b43legacy. The output of lspci -nn for these devices is

01:09.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g
Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4320] (rev 03)
01:0a.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4303 802.11b Wireless
LAN Controller [14e4:4301] (rev 02)

Upon booting, I noticed the following messages in the log:

 b44: b44.c:v2.0
 b44: Invalid MAC address found in EEPROM
 b44 ssb1:1: Problem fetching invariants of chip, aborting

 b44: probe of ssb1:1 failed with error -22

As this box does not have a b44 installed, I wondered why this was happening.
When I unloaded all the drivers and used modprobe to load ssb, I found that b43,
b43legacy and b44 were all loaded. The console output is

finger at pam:~> lsmod | grep b4             <== none loaded
finger@pam:~> sudo modprobe -v ssb        <== load ssb
insmod /lib/modules/2.6.37-wl+/kernel/drivers/ssb/ssb.ko

The above looks normal, but look at what is now resident!

finger@pam:~> lsmod | grep b4
b43legacy             115302  0
b44                    28767  0
b43                   174321  0
ssb                    38157  3 b43legacy,b44,b43
mac80211              266240  2 b43legacy,b43
cfg80211              161930  3 b43legacy,b43,mac80211

Any idea why loading ssb should silently load b43legacy AND b44? Any ideas on
where to look?

Thanks,

Larry