Broadcom Chipset Comments

Broadcom's “AirForce One” line of chipsets is recently catching up with Atheros in terms of Linux support. The new b43/b43legacy driver in 2.6.24 and up, when patched, can inject at speeds pretty much on par with Atheros. It also handles all attacks nicely, including fragmentation (although the underlying stack, mac80211, requires a patch to inject fragments). Current development versions of the driver can actually reach speeds higher than those possible with Atheros, often up to 700 PPS and over. Multi-VAP operation/concurrent monitor and managed interfaces, similar to the one seen in Madwifi, is also implemented through the underlying mac80211 stack.

Windows, on the other hand, is not supported, except for some older 802.11b-only chipsets.

Like Madwifi, b43 offers no support for Broadcom-based USB devices. For those, a separate driver called rndis_wlan exists, which doesn't support monitor mode (and will never do so, as the chipset has no raw mode). Draft-N devices are also not yet supported.

Users whom use broadcom linux_sta driver (otherwise known as wl) should note that there are no monitor/injection modes with such driver. Broadcom deliberately removed the functionality out of their proprietary binary blob. Read here for more info: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Nov/506. Also b43 supports less than a handful of chipsets, take note on which ones are unsupported and see if yours fall into that category: b43