[gentoo-user] b43-legacy and newer linux kernels?

[BRM <bm_witness@yahoo.com>]

I have a laptop that has been running Linux Kernel 2.6.30 Gentoo-R8 (gentoo 
sources, don't remember which version) for a while. It has a Broadcom 4306 Rev 2 
wireless card that has been working well with that kernel. I extracted the 
firmware from the broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5 blob a while ago using b43-fwcutter 
011. I have to hard-code the network settings in /etc/conf.d/net for my home 
network, but am able to use wpa_supplicant whenever I go elsewhere. (I think 
it's my home wireless router that causes the issue; probably needs a firmware 
upgrade.)

Any how, I recently upgraded to Linux Kernel 2.6.34 Gentoo-R7 (gentoo-sources 
2.6.34-r1); again using the b43-legacy driver for the wireless. However, now I 
can't keep a network connection up. I keep getting errors from the 
/etc/init.d/net.wlan0 startup - namely: SIOCSIFFLAGS Unknown Error 132. I had to 
reboot onto the older kernel to write this message and try to research the issue 
a little.

From on-line, some sites suggest the following as a solution:

rmmod ath9k
rfkill block all
rfkill unblock all
modprobe ath9k
rfkill unblock all
however, rfkill seems to only be in testing for gentoo 
(http://packages.gentoo.org/package/net-wireless/rfkill), and I'm using the 
b43-legacy instead of the ath9k driver - okay, no problem there, just switch out 
which driver is unloaded and reloaded. Haven't tried it yet as I have to reboot; 
but even so - they are saying this has to be done on every reboot, and that's 
not much of a solution.

Further, I can't seem to find a version of b43-fwcutter that will extract any of 
the b43-legacy firmware - even the one I had successfully extracted (011, 012, 
13).

Has anyone else seen this? Does anyone know if this gets resolved (or made 
worse) by a newer kernel?

Ben