[PATCH wireless-next v3] wifi: brcmfmac: log the firmware status when a connect fails
From: Ryohei Hashimoto <hidden>
Date: 2026-09-13 16:55:40
Also in:
lkml
Subsystem:
broadcom brcm80211 ieee802.11 wireless drivers, the rest · Maintainers:
Arend van Spriel, Linus Torvalds
brcmf_bss_connect_done() receives the firmware event in @e but discards it on the failure path. Every failed connect is reported to cfg80211 as WLAN_STATUS_AUTH_TIMEOUT (16), whatever the firmware actually said, so userspace only ever sees: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT bssid=00:00:00:00:00:00 status_code=16 The all-zero BSSID comes from the same place: conn_params is memset to zero and profile->bssid has not been filled in when the station never associated. status_code=16 therefore carries no information about the cause. It is not an AP response and it does not mean "authentication timed out" - it is the only failure value this driver can produce. This is a recurring source of confusion: [1] has been open since 2023 with more than twenty follow-ups and no explanation of the code, and covers BCM4345/6, BCM43430 and CYW43455 across several kernel versions. It supersedes [2], filed against the firmware repository a day earlier and closed in favour of it. The firmware's own status (BRCMF_E_STATUS_*) is more specific - FAIL, TIMEOUT, NO_NETWORKS, ABORT and so on - and it is already in hand. Log it so the cause can be narrowed down without rebuilding the kernel. bphy_err() is used rather than brcmf_dbg() or brcmf_info(): it is the form the rest of this file uses, and of the three it is the only one that is both visible in a distribution kernel and bounded. brcmf_dbg(CONN) expands to no_printk() unless CONFIG_BRCMDBG is set, which is what makes the reports in [1] and [2] impossible to act on - the people hitting this run stock kernels. brcmf_info() expands to a plain pr_info() in a non-debug build and is not rate limited, and wpa_supplicant retries the association every few seconds, so it would flood the log. bphy_err() is guarded by net_ratelimit() there, so a station retrying against an unreachable AP prints at most a few lines per second. All three fields are printed because only some of them are meaningful on each path into the failure branch. brcmf_is_nonetwork() keys off @status, so that is the useful field for a join that never associated - the case in [1]. brcmf_is_linkdown() keys off @event_code and @flags and does not look at @status at all, so @status can read 0 there; on those events it is @reason which carries the 802.11 reason code, as the mapping in brcmf_map_fw_linkdown_reason() shows. Printing the three together lets the reader tell which path was taken instead of guessing from one number. The status reported to cfg80211 is left alone; changing it would alter what userspace sees. [1] https://github.com/RPi-Distro/firmware-nonfree/issues/38 [2] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1829 Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 Signed-off-by: Ryohei Hashimoto <redacted> --- v3: - add the Assisted-by tag required by Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst. It was missing from v1 and v2; sorry for the omission. Tooling, as asked for by Documentation/process/generated-content.rst: an LLM was used throughout. It read the driver, proposed the change, and drafted this changelog. The starting point was my own problem - a Raspberry Pi in a car that logs status_code=16 on every failed connect - and every claim above was checked against the source before being written down: that brcmf_is_nonetwork() reads @status, that brcmf_is_linkdown() reads @event_code and @flags, that bphy_err() is behind net_ratelimit() while brcmf_info() is not, and that bphy_err() is what the rest of cfg80211.c uses. No specialized analysis tool (coccinelle, sparse and the like) was involved. Testing: built against mainline (2f0c1cf72, 2026-09-12) for arm64 with W=1; cfg80211.o compiles with no new warnings, and checkpatch.pl --strict reports no issues. Not tested on hardware: the affected device has a read-only root and lives in a car, so building a module on it is impractical and I have not observed the new line firing. v2: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-wireless/20260909080603.2955-1-laurel.medalist12@gmail.com/ (local) v1: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-wireless/20260909064125.67844-1-laurel.medalist12@gmail.com/ (local) drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmfmac/cfg80211.c | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
diff --git a/drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmfmac/cfg80211.c b/drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmfmac/cfg80211.c
index 872c488..114dabb 100644
--- a/drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmfmac/cfg80211.c
+++ b/drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmfmac/cfg80211.c@@ -6522,6 +6522,8 @@ brcmf_bss_connect_done(struct brcmf_cfg80211_info *cfg, clear_bit(BRCMF_VIF_STATUS_ASSOC_SUCCESS, &ifp->vif->sme_state); conn_params.status = WLAN_STATUS_AUTH_TIMEOUT; + bphy_err(ifp->drvr, "connect failed: event %u status %u reason %u\n", + e->event_code, e->status, e->reason); } conn_params.links[0].bssid = profile->bssid; conn_params.req_ie = conn_info->req_ie;