WiFi and Broadcom - Handling the Errors

Two bugs related to error handling have been fixed by our developers in the proprietary driver for Broadcom WiFi adapters (broadcom-wl, a.k.a. broadcom-sta, a.k.a. wl). Both problems (#2146, #2667) lead to kernel crashes at boot time on the laptops of several our users.

By the way, not all major Linux distributions have these problems fixed at the time of writing.

Early Call to wl_cfg80211_detach()

wl_cfg80211_detach() function of the drivers was called too early in some cases, even before the needed data structures had been initialized by the driver. It is still unclear why this could happen because part of the relevant function call chain is in a "closed" (distributed in a binary form) component of the driver.

So far, this has been fixed "symptomatically": the checks have been added in the appropriate places of the code. The problem has been reported to the developers of the driver but there has been no visible response so far.

NULL Pointer Dereference in wl_inform_single_bss()

This problem was easier to understand. ieee80211_get_channel() function called by the driver may return NULL. The driver, however, did not take that into account. The fix is straightforward.

— Eugene.shatokhin (talk) • 17:27, 29 October 2013 • no comments

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