Broadcom-wl-dkms

Moderation Note: Moved from Just in case anyone is experiencing issues with their WiFi on 5.10.3 so all the potential solutions would be in the pinned post.

Morning all!

A day or so ago I did a system update that installed the 5.10.3 Linux Kernel that broke my Broadcom WIFI drivers (no connectivity). So I had to run my 50ft Ethernet cable across the room for fixing (I am stubborn).

Turns out the issue was that the community repo Broadcom-WL driver was not updated (installed, but not working). I found out that you can enable the community-testing repo and install the newer broadcom package for the time being and then switch over to the regular repo should it become available in the future which looks like already happened.

This is just out here for a future solution should anyone else encounter it - I am sure there is a better way like rolling back the updates but I couldn’t figure it out (still new) and also tried using my LTS kernel with no luck.

Driver in question:
https://archlinux.org/packages/community-testing/x86_64/broadcom-wl/

I enabled the community-testing repo and edited the pacman.conf file located in ./etc to be search only so I can pick and choose.

Find/Locate and edit the pacman.conf file using Vi or your favorite editor to uncomment “[community-testing] include =/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist” and add “Usage = Sync Search” below it.

It should look like this:
[community-testing] Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Usage = Sync Search

Re-sync using
pacman -Sy

Use to install the alternate driver.
pacman -S community-testing/broadcom-wl-dkms

2 Likes