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Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

What are the issue with Broadcom chips?

One year ago:

Broadcom bluetooth/wifi chips ran out of firmware hot patch ram slots long time ago. Company seems to be too cheap to respin the rom mask with all the fixes baked in. From what I remember even brand new iphone x ships with no room for BT firmware patching.

RECON 2019 - Reversing and Exploiting Broadcom Bluetooth (Jiska Classen, Dennis Mantz) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Mi8_9ABCc

35C3 - Dissecting Broadcom Bluetooth (Jiska Classen, Dennis Mantz) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nI9ok7iQg

Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or Server enthusiast markets either, they're a step above Realtek. Oddly Intel is well regarded though...

It mostly comes down to drivers from what I understand but I'm not entirely familiar with all the objections.

I would much rather have a realtek or intel controller than a broadcom one. My thinkpad has a realtek, my last laptop (an xps13) had an intel controller, and they just worked without issue.

Admittedly it's been a while since I had a broadcom controller, but I had all sorts of problems with it. Random disconnects etc.

Realteks also have documentation and thus open-source drivers, which was for a very long time (and very much still is) a problem with Broadcom's notorious closedness.

In my experience, Intel has higher performance and more features (which might be a downside from the point of complexity and configuration) at a higher cost, while Realtek is slower, but cheap, simple and reliable.

I long ago realized that just buying an Intel wifi card and replacing whatever crap my laptop ships with is totally worth it. (At least many 15" laptops ship with replaceable cards, don't know about smaller ones).

> Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or Server enthusiast markets either

I always thought that it was funny that their NICs are much to be desired yet their ASICs power a wide variety of enterprise network switches capable of moving terabits of traffic at low latency.

https://people.ucsc.edu/~warner/buffer.html

If people keep buying their crap then why would they be motivated to fix it?

Broadcom has been through so many mergers and acquisitions that I doubt the two product lines have much DNA in common.

Even Broadcom's wired NICs have different generations that came from different acquisitions: Tigon3 (tg3) came from Alteon AceNIC, I forgot where NetExtreme 2 (bnx2) came from, and NetExteme E (bnxt) is an in-house effort that is somewhat derived from the StrataXGS switches.

So yeah, Broadcom is a rollup of two dozen different companies so the quality of one product tells you nothing about others.

You can't compare these two markets. Whether or not these chips work well comes down to firmware and drivers, and every customer gets their own custom datasheet, firmware, and driver. If you hack that into something good, your product will be good. (You're going to need to fix a lot of code and of course have a lot of meetings. Worth it if you're selling a million units, I suppose.) If you just buy some chips off the back of a truck in Shenzhen, solder them onto some circuit board you built in your garage, and use the three-years-out-of-date reference drivers written in a day by some random intern, the results will not be as good. Apple, I assume, uses the first approach when working with hardware vendors. The WiFi card you got for $3 on Amazon probably doesn't.

Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or anything.

> Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or anything.

Shitty firmware and garbage reference drivers sounds like endorsement enough.

Dell is also following the first route and they shipped a PC(alienware) with shitty broadcom drivers(that was a 4yrs ago). I have avoided broadcom ever since..

And yet “the wifi is shit” isn’t something you hear said very often about MacBooks.

I dont think Broadcom's WiFI are inherently bad. If I have to argue ALL WiFi are bad.

The only reason why Realtek dominates is because they are the cheaper alternative. The only reason why Intel dominate WiFI on PC is because they are bundled as part of their CPU sales for Laptop.

Most of the half decent WiFI AP still uses Broadcom. Although increasingly Qualcomm is making inroad. So Boradcom is stuck in the middle of no where in consumer market. They dont have WiFi in PC Laptops, nor do they have WiFi in Android Smartphone. Apple being the largest Broadcom customer for their consumer grade WiFI. And that is why every 2-3 years you may have read Broadcom's intentional leaks about they want to sell their WiFi chipset division because they dont want to play balls with Apple's WiFi asking price.

Not sure about OP but the hardest part about getting linux on a macbook is getting wifi to work because there are no FOSS drivers.

Genuinely curious, is it harder than getting Linux working with the proprietary Apple variant of ARM? Or are you talking pre-M1?

The M1 still uses a broadcom wifi chip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669358, so presumably because it's a newer chip it'll be more difficult.

Sure there are, it's called brcmfmac. If the AsahiLinux team hasn't already got it working, certainly Corellium did a few months ago in their much hyped public demo image.

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/brcm80211

OpenBSD has also added support to their bwfm(4) driver already for 6.9.

Wireless is absolutely not the hardest problem for the M1 Mac, or running on any Mac, for that matter.

Broadcom Wi-Fi languished for something around a decade under the "b43" driver before Broadcom showed up with their brcmfmac driver, it caused significant anger within the kernel community that they decided to write a new driver instead of just augmenting the existing one

They have various product families and more than 2 drivers.

I need the bcmwl driver (dkms) for some 4-5 year old HP laptop and it has severe problems with some APs and slight problems with others. Overall it's just bad.

Debugging it showed that it's only a thin Linux wrapper around some huge binary blob they use. So not really FOSS, but of course that's what we are used to with firmware. This was't really firmware, they use the blob on the CPU IIRC. (It's been years I debugged this, since then Broadcom is just something that raises a red flag to me.)

Usually it's missing firmware rather than drivers.

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