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by IntelMiner 1883 days ago
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
1 comments

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.)