PiBox

See this rpi forum post. Apparently I might need to fallback to older firmware.

wget https://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/pool/main/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-brcm80211_20161130-3+rpt3_all.deb
ar firmware*.deb
tar xf data.tar.gz
cp lib/firmware/brcm/* to RPi

The downloaded .deb is in rpi2/extras/netconfig.

Checking brcmfmac43455-sdio.bin in the non-free repo, it appears that the Jan25th commit is the last one. So maybe bumping back to the one before that is sufficient? If so, I can use the fw.cfg as I have been.

But wait - that has been pulling from the non-free repo all this time! The problem is it's probably pulling from master. The one I probably want is
https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/raw/7533cd1f124f07d87ca6fd11a4a2143748ed806c/brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.bin
along with
https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/raw/7533cd1f124f07d87ca6fd11a4a2143748ed806c/brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.clm_blob
and
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/7533cd1f124f07d87ca6fd11a4a2143748ed806c/brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.txt

I need to grab these on a test system, reboot and see if bringing up the wifi client manually works. FYI - currently bringing up the wifi client manually fails. If you run iwlist scan you get the following in dmesg:

[  422.529171] ieee80211 phy0: brcmf_run_escan: error (-52)
[  422.534527] ieee80211 phy0: brcmf_cfg80211_scan: scan error (-52)

There is an old stackexchange discussion that says power management is off by default now, but apparently it's not. Perhaps that's because the new firmware has it fixed but breaks something else, so I went back to the old firmware which might have power management enabled but doesn't have the new firmware bug. It's just a possibility.

It also suggests adding the following to /etc/network/interfaces.

allow-hotplug wlan0
    wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
wireless-power off

and suggests that power management should be disabled for all wifi devices, even usb ones. That would mean I don't really need to test for which wifi is up, but rather just disable power management for all of them.

Nope, a clean build with just the clm blob didn't work with master branch firmware, with or without disabling power management.

Next up: try with the back rev'd firmware instead.

Just did a comparison of the node that works and the one that doesn't - and I can find no software differences. I ran sum's on all the firmware files and they match. I have all the same firmware files by name. I have the same wpa_supplicant and interfaces files.

That said, the files from the .deb I have do not match what I have in the build. Also, the non-firmware git log shows various changes this year so maybe I can pull from an earlier version that way.

It's still not really resolved after all.

I give up - everything seems to be working fine now. Maybe it was the router being finicky. But the addition of the clm blob seems to be all that was needed to make the driver happy. And new builds on each of three different boards all come up cleanly now. I retried the build with pisentry and it came up just fine this time. And this without eth0 enabled. I'm going to do a build with eth0 enabled by default in the dev platform and then again in pisentry to make sure enabling that doesn't break anything. Then I'll push the changes and close this issue.

Tried older firmware but that didn't work at all. The new firmware works fine as a client. But it seems to fail as an AP.

One report says to try this version to avoid crashing the firmware:
http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/pool/main/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-brcm80211_20190114-1+rpt4_all.deb

There are also more 20190114 releases at the same site going up through 2021. But the report says bugs start with firmware-brcm80211_20190114-1+rpt6_all so using rpt4 is a good bet to try.

Might also try adding brcmfmac.debug=0x100000 in config.txt.

Still not making any progress on this.

Here's another reported issue from a few years ago that sounds just like my issue. The implication here is that I possibly have to fall back to a 4.19 kernel and associated firmware.

I can enable debug with -s -dd for hostapd, which gives lots of additional info in /var/log/messages.

The test device has eth0 enabled at 81.

Remove the disabling of the wifi in config.txt from the pinet postinst script.

# Disable pi3 wifi because it's not working in 5.10.y.
grep -q pi3-disable-wifi "${CONFIG}" 
if [[ $? -eq 1 ]]; then
    echo "dtoverlay=disable-wifi" >> "${CONFIG}" 
fi