Here is some statistics in the best case scenario when I have a very good access point at home. b43 is second to ACPI by the amount of generated messages in the logs. [apodtele@home ~]$ dmesg | grep -c b43 43 At work this number is more like 843 given a poor access point. Anyway, why reload firmware 7 times by now? I believe it didn't use to be lke this. Is driver moving in the wrong direction? Please don't tell me this is totally normal because it will sound like BSOD is by design. [apodtele@home ~]$ dmesg | grep firmware b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10) b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10) b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10) b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10) b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10) b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10) b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10)
There might be any number of reasons to reload firmware. A quick perusal of the sources suggest that it is reloaded after suspend/resume, when recovering from certain errors, when changing some configuration parameters, and probably on ifconfig up as well. I would need your complete dmesg output or contents of /var/log/messages and a more thorough description of your scenario to be able to comment further. Are you experiencing real problems? Or are you simply annoyed by the firmware loading messages?
Created attachment 299918 [details] b43 fixes everything by reloading firmware :) No, I don't suspend/resume. I just use my laptop at work. b43 know one way of dealing with errors: don't think -- reload the firmware. This attachment contains 41 reloads. Crazy!
With recent kernel-2.6.24.6-90.fc8.i686, reloads stopped and firmware seems to be loaded just once. Cool.