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Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

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Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#91

Post by TwoBit »

kalleboo wrote: post #69
gumby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the recent phones (X or 11?) used Intel for part of its builds (as far as I remember you couldn’t tell from serial number). Apple had a lot of problems and swore off the Intel parts, which killed Intel’s wireless business. I assumed Apple bought the Intel product line for IP, especially after that episode.

Apple used Intel modems for many generations - the iPhone 7, X/8, XS, 11. For some generations they used Qualcomm chips in the models for CDMA regions since Intel didn't make a CDMA modem. So you could tell which chip you'd get from the iPhone model number. Apple ditched Intel due to Intel being at least a year behind on 5G. These modems were all LTE modems though. They've always used separate Broadcom chips for WiFi…

> due to Intel being at least a year behind

That's not the only thing Intel is at least a year behind on.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#92

Post by rurp »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #8
Nextgrid wrote: post #5

Big Sur has been a significant drop in quality, even worse than Catalina. Some are bugs such as this one and some are just deliberately stupid design decisions like the changes to the notifications. I’m worried for the future of the Mac.

As Linux laptop user, I'm bemused when the competition gets worse. Maybe Linux on Apple Silicon will be the best of both worlds in a few years --- I think the dedicated porting effort will more than succeed and will get something more polished than Linux on Intel macs ever was.

It worked in my case. The issues with Catalina and the mac hardware pushed me to switch to Linux for my personal dev machine a few years ago. The transition was tough at first but now I love that machine. It makes me wayyy happier than the MacBook I have to use at work.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#93

Post by TwoBit »

Bluecobra wrote: post #67
cptskippy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#94

Post by dm33tri »

Stratoscope wrote: post #65
imwillofficial wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dongles are usually not Bluetooth or WiFi. But sometimes share the same frequencies. The M1 MacBooks have been having Bluetooth issues. Not applicable to your dongle issue, but for others: One weird trick that works without fail for me is disabling WiFi, connecting your Bluetooth devices, and reenabling WiFi. Don’t know why it works.

To elaborate on this for GP, if a keyboard has its own wireless dongle, it is usually in the 2.4GHz frequency band, same as used by microwave ovens, Bluetooth, and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. The keyboard and/or dongle should list the frequency band it uses. The Wi-Fi chipset in the computer is not used at all here. The dongle presents itself to the computer as a USB human input device, just like any other USB keyboard or mouse. T…

Yeah same I thought my laptop broke because my AirPods and my mouse weren't working. Turned out it's the other laptop connected to 2.4GHz across the room.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#95

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

S_A_P wrote: post #39
AlexandrB wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS quality has been declining for years. It can't all be due to the M1 transition.

You would think that with each release being so much worse than previous versions that eventually OSX would quit booting up and become nothing more than a proof of concept. So much hyperbole in this thread. A solid subset of users declares that the sky is falling and this is the end for Apple. Rinse and repeat with each iteration. I am not saying there haven’t been missteps, but it ain’t all bad. My personal experien…

Does Big Sur let you loopback audio out yet, or are third-party extensions still required? Do Soundflower & BlackHole even work on M1?

The fact there hasn't been native loopback for so long is mind-boggling. I'm a Mac user and use BlackHole.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been on a call and someone with a Mac has gone to share screen and been confused as to why their audio isn't being shared. COVID/WFH has made this a regular occurrence.

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#96

Post by marcan_42 »

rubicks wrote: post #17
Ericson2314 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Linux laptop user, I'm bemused when the competition gets worse. Maybe Linux on Apple Silicon will be the best of both worlds in a few years --- I think the dedicated porting effort will more than succeed and will get something more polished than Linux on Intel macs ever was.

I don't share your optimism. If proprietary firmware and dkms blobs remain _de rigueur_, I can't see the situation on linux improving w.r.t. things like graphics cards and wifi chips.

WiFi is literally the only blob Linux will have to deal with as far as we can tell, and I'll make sure our installer pulls it from the system firmware partition (which will always exist on a functional Mac) so nobody will have to worry about it. All the other blobs are loaded by system firmware before Linux even gets to run, so they might as well be invisible to us (UEFI on PCs does much the same thing).

No DKMS, ever. All our drivers are headed to mainline. I'm not even going to bother with DKMS most likely; people who want to use bleeding edge drivers before they're merged can use our kernel trees (and we'll have builds available for those folks).

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#97

Post by spiznnx »

Bluecobra wrote: post #67
cptskippy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

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

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#98

Post by IntelMiner »

notaplumber wrote: post #53
SilverRed wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#99

Post by IntelMiner »

dannyw wrote: post #75
SilverRed wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't broadcom the worst part of the rpi? It's impossible to boot the pi without loading a binary blob backdoor first

How about the fact that Broadcom essentially enabled the Pi to be created in the first place?

Broadcom "enabled" the Pi to be created because the SoC for the original RPi 1 was a flop. They wanted to use it for Set Top Box (Cable TV, Google TV etc) devices but couldn't find any buyers

One of the engineers who worked on it worked out a deal with Broadcom to simply reuse the design and market it toward education instead

Re: Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken

#100

Post by wumpus »

reader_mode wrote: post #71
gumby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the recent phones (X or 11?) used Intel for part of its builds (as far as I remember you couldn’t tell from serial number). Apple had a lot of problems and swore off the Intel parts, which killed Intel’s wireless business. I assumed Apple bought the Intel product line for IP, especially after that episode.

>which killed Intel’s wireless business I was under the impression that modern laptops ship with intel WiFi cards (I think I saw some Lenovo laptop use it). Do you mean it killed their modems ?

WiFi and cellphones are both wireless, but this discussion is about cellphones.
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