Wi-Fi packet capturing on M1 Macs is broken • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by cptskippy » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 5:28 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #90

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.

You can't compare these two markets. Whether or not these chips work well comes down to firmware and drivers, and every customer gets their own custom datasheet, firmware, and driver. If you hack that into something good, your product will be good. (You're going to need to fix a lot of code and of course have a lot of meetings. Worth it if you're selling a million units, I suppose.) If you just buy some chips off the…

> Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or anything.

Shitty firmware and garbage reference drivers sounds like endorsement enough.

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

#112

Post by 1_player » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 5:32 AM UTC

hderms wrote: post #64

imwillofficial wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux on desktop users shouldn’t be bemused until Linux desktop experience isn’t a pile of UX trash. Linux on the desktop is still so frustrating, ugly, and only marginally more useful over a Mac for extremely specific use cases, that I would rather use Windows + WSL2.

I've become a wsl convert now as I can trust windows to deal with sleep/wakeup and wifi much better than linux. If macosx experiences a developer exodus I think it's likely many will follow suit. Especially with things like WSLg coming out

These past 6 months with WSL2 are the most productive I've been since I've spent 2 years on the Apple ecosystem or 15 years on Linux.

I don't have to debug OS wide breakages or weird Wifi/BT issues or unstable GUIs and it's running Linux, not BSD on a weird kernel and file system with... interesting permissions and security settings.

And I can play games and use Docker at native speed.

YMMV.

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

#113

Post by xfer » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 5:37 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #90

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.

You can't compare these two markets. Whether or not these chips work well comes down to firmware and drivers, and every customer gets their own custom datasheet, firmware, and driver. If you hack that into something good, your product will be good. (You're going to need to fix a lot of code and of course have a lot of meetings. Worth it if you're selling a million units, I suppose.) If you just buy some chips off the…

Dell is also following the first route and they shipped a PC(alienware) with shitty broadcom drivers(that was a 4yrs ago). I have avoided broadcom ever since..

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

#114

Post by andrewmcwatters » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 5:52 AM UTC

roody15 wrote: post #61

Leopard = meh Snow Leopard = Awesome Lion = meh Yosemite = ok Sierra = good High Sierra = Awesome Mojave = meh Catalina = meh Big Sur = meh (snow leopard and high sierra were the best IMO) Mac Admin for 15 years

The Snow Leopard days of the Mac made me want one. Everything since then has been a disappointment. I miss the big little details like the Welcome intros and beautiful usage of CoreAnimation. Now it seems like nothing uses it, and macOS seems far far less magical than ever.

I could never see Apple coming up with the original Time Machine design anymore.

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

#115

Post by usr1106 » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 6:10 AM UTC

IntelMiner wrote: post #98

notaplumber wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.)

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

#116

Post by ksec » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 6:25 AM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #40

anitil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the issue with Broadcom chips?

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.

I dont think Broadcom's WiFI are inherently bad. If I have to argue ALL WiFi are bad.

The only reason why Realtek dominates is because they are the cheaper alternative. The only reason why Intel dominate WiFI on PC is because they are bundled as part of their CPU sales for Laptop.

Most of the half decent WiFI AP still uses Broadcom. Although increasingly Qualcomm is making inroad. So Boradcom is stuck in the middle of no where in consumer market. They dont have WiFi in PC Laptops, nor do they have WiFi in Android Smartphone. Apple being the largest Broadcom customer for their consumer grade WiFI. And that is why every 2-3 years you may have read Broadcom's intentional leaks about they want to sell their WiFi chipset division because they dont want to play balls with Apple's WiFi asking price.

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

#117

Post by ksec » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 6:34 AM UTC

my123 wrote: post #3

Interesting that Apple still uses Broadcom Wi-Fi + BT chips in most of their product range despite lots of issues with them. Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi + BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup to those.

>Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi + BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup to those.

Apple has renewed their WiFI commitment to Broadcom for at least another 3 years. Marking WiFI, or in fact any Wireless Controller is hard, making it that is also a moving target ( Both WiFi 6E/ WiFi 7 and 5G / 3GPP Rel 17 ) is even harder.

But if Apple do intend to make their own WiFi ( Which makes perfect sense from an BOM cost reduction perspective ), please also bring back AirPort Wireless Router.

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

#118

Post by Ballas » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 6:34 AM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #41

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.

Still no where near as bad a Linux on the laptop the last time I tried it. I haven't used Linux on a laptop in a decade because it was so bad I swore it off.

I have been using linux on a laptop for the past 5 years. The only issue I have is with Nvidia (which is a requirement in my case).

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

#119

Post by skohan » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 6:35 AM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #107

IntelMiner wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And it boots with the GPU which is not 3D accelerated in version 4 because the whole project was done by one person who just left. This is one of most popular SBCs out there. I wish it was a bit better.

Are there any high performance single-board computers on the market currently? I use a lot of Rpi's in personal projects, and I've been thinking about a home file server in a super small form-factor. What I would like is an SBC somewhere on the size scale of a smartphone, with performance in the range of a current flagship phone.

Does something like this exist?

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

#120

Post by yarcob » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

55555 wrote: post #79

SamBam wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth wouldn't need a dongle on a modern computer. But I'd be surprised that it's wifi and not some other frequency radio communication.

They always seem to come with a dongle just incase though, and sometimes people use the dongle despite having bluetooth, or plug them in and then connect to the computer's built-in bluetooth.

The problem with Bluetooth is that it just doesn't work well when you want to use one keyboard or mouse with multiple computers.

For this reason I prefer the dongles. Want to use your mouse on a different Mac? Just plug the dongle in a different computer.

I don't know how often I ended up at the password prompt with no way to type the password because the keyboard didn't connect, or was connected to a different Mac, and I had no idea how to get it to connect to the Mac I was trying to start.