Different broadcom wireless models in lspci and dmesg

Question

I have a Dell Inspiron 5520, Ubuntu 16.04 installed. I have some issues with the wireless. Sometimes the network doesn't response and starts working again after network restart or disabling/enabling Wifi. But again it stops working once in a while.

The thing that I'm curious about is that the BCM model in lspci output is different from dmesg:

$ lspci | grep BCM
08:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n (rev 01)

$ dmesg | grep BCM
[    2.350917] usb 2-1.5: Product: BCM43142A0
[    3.325396] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: chip id 70
[    3.345871] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM (001.001.011) build 0000
[    3.349485] bluetooth hci0: Direct firmware load for brcm/BCM.hcd failed with error -2
[    3.349489] Bluetooth: hci0: BCM: Patch brcm/BCM.hcd not found
[    3.442293] wlan0: Broadcom BCM4365 802.11 Hybrid Wireless Controller 6.30.223.248 (r487574)

As you can see it's BCM43142 in lspci and BCM4365 in dmesg. Could it be the cause of the problem?

UPDATE:

Response to Hölderlin comment:

$ lspci -nnk | grep -i network -A2
08:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4365] (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Dell Wireless 1704 802.11n + BT 4.0 [1028:0016]
    Kernel driver in use: wl

$ dmesg | grep "wlan0\|wl"
[    3.295548] wl: module license 'MIXED/Proprietary' taints kernel.
[    3.297473] wl: module verification failed: signature and/or required key missing - tainting kernel
[    3.442293] wlan0: Broadcom BCM4365 802.11 Hybrid Wireless Controller 6.30.223.248 (r487574)
[    3.517031] wl 0000:08:00.0 wlp8s0: renamed from wlan0
[    4.290537] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlp8s0: link is not ready
[  612.884636] ERROR @wl_dev_intvar_get : error (-1)
[  612.884643] ERROR @wl_cfg80211_get_tx_power : error (-1)
[  971.996317] ERROR @wl_dev_intvar_get : error (-1)
[  971.996323] ERROR @wl_cfg80211_get_tx_power : error (-1)
[  984.256990] ERROR @wl_dev_intvar_get : error (-1)
[  984.256998] ERROR @wl_cfg80211_get_tx_power : error (-1)
[ 5536.445371] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlp8s0: link is not ready

UPDATE2:

Thanks to Hölderlin I could find out that there is no problem with BCM names and the device-ids are the same. On the other hand I could fix my wireless issues by updating its driver from here.

Please try a different filter like lspci -nnk | grep -i network -A2 and dmesg | grep "wlan0\|wl". Perhaps dmesg shows you not the full wlan0 stack which is present and loaded. Compare to the bluetooth device. dmesg shows you only that the bluetooth stack is present and loaded not if there is a physical a bluetooth device present. At the end it is more important to compare the device-id and driver module from both outputs. — Hölderlin, Jan 03 '17 at 19:00
Now you can see the exact device-id [14e4:4365] is the same which is listed via dmesg. First you can delete your code snippets above the update section and edit your question again because the error comes not from the differnet labels. And try to resolve the errors in dmesg, so first add the output of lsmod to your question. — Hölderlin, Jan 03 '17 at 20:28
@Hölderlin I can't see [14e4:4365] in dmesg. Do you mean that 4365 of BCM4365 came from the second part of 14e4:4365? — Amir Karimi, Jan 05 '17 at 06:18
I mean, if the exact device-id is compareable with a label which is listed in the dmesg (message of kernel ring buffer) stack, then this is a good evidence that both labels belongs to the same thing. It makes your question more readable if you would delete your incomplete output of lspci and dmseg above your update section. — Hölderlin, Jan 05 '17 at 19:24
@Hölderlin thank you so much for your help. Actually, you helped me to figure out why the names were different but the problem with my WiFi was something else. I could find more info here and after updating the driver it works better now. So I can delete this question or you can post your comment as an answer. — Amir Karimi, Jan 06 '17 at 07:50
Yes, I would like to give an answer later to raise my reps :) If you accept it. — Hölderlin, Jan 06 '17 at 11:30
Go on, I updated the question as well to give more information for people who has the same issue. But you helped me to get my first answer so I'll accept your answer as well :) — Amir Karimi, Jan 06 '17 at 13:13
Please run the wireless script that is in the accepted answer in the link below so we may see the information needed to help diagnose the issue. http://askubuntu.com/questions/425155/my-wireless-wifi-connection-does-not-work- what-can-i-do — Wild Man, Jan 07 '17 at 03:33
@WildMan as I said it works correctly after installing a newer version of broadcom-sta-dkms — Amir Karimi, Jan 07 '17 at 14:31

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

First of all in my opnion it is not easy to find a table which connects the given device-id [14e4:4365] for chip id bcm43142 with a driver which is available in ubuntu.

To give an answer to your question I assume you are doing this from scratch and have not changed any configuration files, modules or drivers in the system. So I guess the issue was that the list of available packages was not up to date, because the driver you are installed was from 2014:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-image-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') linux-headers-$(uname -r|sed 's,[^-]*-[^-]*-,,') broadcom-sta-dkms

As I mentioned in my comments it would be also helpful to see which moduls you have already loaded (output of lsmod), because it is recommented to unload conflicting moduls and blacklisting them. So if you would add those information to your question other user are able to compare those modules. You can also clear up the code snippets above your first update section as well. You have not to care about your edits, because there is a versioning control which registers all edits to the system as you can see if you click edit.

Different broadcom wireless models in lspci and dmesg

1 Answers1