BCM4360 wifi drivers

which firmware or kmod wifi driver for wifi I need to enable to have wifi support on a netgear R7000 that uses bcm4360?

Somehow with default building I can't get wifi support. DD-wrt has it out of the box, so at least some drivers should be working I assume.

DD-Wrt most likely has binary drivers from Broadcom they are not allowed to redistribute freely. Years ago I read they had an NDA with Broadcom, and that probably still applies.

Until Broadcom starts supporting it with their 'open source' driver, or support gets into b43 or the likes, you won't be able to run LEDE or OpenWrt on it, unfortunately.

Thank you for your explanation Booromini. I wasn't aware of this. Since the R7000 is on the market for quite some time, I think we can rest assured Broadcom will never support it.

Well I reverted back to DD-wrt on my R7000. Kept LEDE on all my other devices, but this one device back to DD-WRT.

To me it's not so important LEDE/openWRT/DD-wrt. I prefer LEDE though, but the others are fine as well.

ah I wish I was aware of this before bcm4360 router.
oh well.. stuck with Asus Merlin for now. but I prefer LEDE so much more.

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Would someone just leak the dang thing already its a driver for god sake. Sheesh!

And what would you be able to do with that leaked driver that depends on hundreds of hacks in Broadcoms 2.6.x kernel

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We are a community I may not be able to do much as an individual but as a community anything is possible. Telling the truth it is all new to me I set out to possibly make a build for the EA6500v1 and was shut down at the whole broadcom FOSS thing. Hundreds of hacks in broadcoms 2.6.x kernel I wonder why hundreds of hacks are needed?

Nothing is impossible I realize some things are hard and often people shy away from difficult things for numerous reasons. There are some who do things because they in fact are not easy. I may not have the knowledge or the time at current but still there are billions of people out there I'm sure someone may.

The whole broadcom issue should be remedied imho. I see zero reasons why there should be anything preventing someone from dumping information using some exploit software or hardware. There should be zero legal issues on disassembly and upgrade its really no different than say modification of other devices like phones and such to an extent it features much of the same hardware. Possibly using broadpwn or some other exploit to get the in depth workings of things. If broadcom don't play nice with the public the public should demand they do. And if they don't listen like their statement says " Don't buy broadcom hardware. " Its a total cop out and their stuff should be leaked. They already have issues with their hardware being exploited and their support is really not that great to be totally honest with a reply like that they should get the business.

Nobody can do something useful, the driver is completely dependent on ancient kernel versions with tons of patches, hell they even have their own hostapd fork.
Even if it leaks you can use it as it violates the licence.

Simply dont buy BCM HW except small number of brcmfmac supported stuff and expect it to be supported

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Even in a hypothetical scenario where you'd be able to get hold of these drivers in some way and would actually get it working (with a modern kernel, so all dandy from a functional point of view) - what then? No one besides yourself would touch that driver with a ten foot pole, because of its legal status, meaning you'd have to 'maintain' (aka keep it running, somehow) forever - that's not going to work longer term.

We already have a couple of drivers which have no legal issues (e.g. RealTek staging or -vendor drivers, RaLink rt3883 iNIC - some with a 'perhaps okayish, fingers crossed, eyes closed' legal status like Lantiq XWAY WAVE300), but where the source is so ugly that they're never going to be merged mainline - look at their status. Yes, someone, sometime ago, may have gotten them mostly working (in case of the RealTek vendor drivers you'll see multiple competing github repos, each with their own share of bugs), but without them behaving like a proper mainline driver (and them actually being mainline or on the road towards mainline), their future fate is doomed anyways - now adding legal complications on top means throwing a spanner into it from the get go. Technical deficiencies could be fixed, long term, with lots of efforts going in - legal complications can't, they hit a stone wall and will taint the driver forever (look at the history behind tiacx/ acx100 and its attempts of going mainline).

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I understand these hurdles I don't expect nothing to be infinite nor perfect per say though and as far as legality there really shouldn't be anything illegal about a driver or kernel to run the hardware you own. Reverse engineering is not some evil thing that should be called illegal in this case this is where things need some changing and it will only change if we stop calling it illegal there is nothing illegal about this from any legal or moral standpoint to make something work better should not be considered illegal. People would like to have you believe there is some magical legal framework you are violating and even if so we all should err to the side of disagreement. Nothing will change if we don't change it.

Sounds like an interesting bit of history I'll try to read into it and maybe we need to support the EFF a bit more and get them working on this front for us it is really all a bit on the insane side anyways.

Thank you both for sharing that brief collage education.

Nothing magical, it is called a license, which you agreed to when you obtained the product.

For an example of typical Broadcom licenses, https://android.googlesource.com/platform/hardware/broadcom/wlan/+/gingerbread-mr4-release/bcm4329/firmware/LICENSE.TXT

2.6. No Other Rights Granted; Restrictions. Apart from the license rights
expressly set forth in this Agreement, Broadcom does not grant and Licensee
does not receive any ownership right, title or interest nor any security
interest or other interest in any intellectual property rights relating to
the Software, nor in any copy of any part of the foregoing. No license is
granted to Licensee in any human readable code of the Software (source code).
Licensee shall not (i) use, license, sell or otherwise distribute the
Software except as provided in this Agreement, (ii) attempt to reverse
engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the Software; or (iii) use
the Software or other material in violation of any applicable law or
regulation, including but not limited to any regulatory agency, such as FCC,
rules.

Altruism is a great principle, but it does not pay the salaries of those that develop the chips, their firmware, their drivers, or any of the rest of the value chain.

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I have contacted the EFF on this issue they are looking into the matter as a potential thing to try and fix. If you need to software to keep the unit up to date beyond the life they wish to provide for it it only makes sense that open sourcing is the correct course of action in this case. We have plenty of developers in the open source community that are glad to take on that challenge and secure these products that are still very useful and common place in most every household. Forced obsolescence is not something that should be taken as lightly as it is. People are complaining about a pollution all of these electronics are causing, and the plastics they are encased in yet forced disposal of these items due to security flaws (Providing you are up enough to be aware) causes it. When the health of the internet at large is at stake because of such practices it is possible we should rethink what is common sense practice vs altruistic. We preach all of this National Security crap and are worried about Hackers from other countries yet we have laws that prevent the general public from keeping things secure. Its just foolish. As far as money goes there is Zero reason for not releasing open source for a driver for a draft AC router. I'd almost argue to the effect that if the company does not provide upgrades there is very little room for profit. And in this case we are dealing with a router from 2012. Maybe there should be a 5 year grace period for having closed source with the exception if there are no new upgrades in for the period of 365 days an open source driver should be made available.

We are not talking about the same thing when it comes to software. Do they not realize that most of this is all depending on Open Source to begin with? The whole point of open source is so that things can be maintained at little cost by the collective of people able to do so.

It is just silly put the health of the internet at stake because you don't want to release an open source driver. There is nothing altruistic in intention here it is rather cut and dry common sense. No matter what the damn license agreement reads. Some of the agreements I've read over the years are just so silly I've stopped reading them because I simply don't agree with a majority of them. And some of them you need to be a legal scholar to discern exactly what they are saying. You surely don't get anywhere by just going with the stream instead we should try to be the water effortlessly finding ways around such obstacles.