Odd behavior of ssb, b43, b43legacy, and b44

["Michael Büsch" <mb@bu3sch.de>]

On Thu, 2011-01-06 at 14:07 -0600, Larry Finger wrote: 
> 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 at 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 at 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
> 

Does one of these wireless cards have a dangling ethernet core? I would
not be surprised...

-- 
Greetings Michael.