Raspberry Pi 3 Wireless interface

I’ve been trying to use my Raspberry Pi 3 with NixOS but I can’t find a way to make it recognize the wlan0 interface.

The following is my configuration.nix:

# current revision is 9f697d60e4d9f08eacf549502528bfaed859d33b
{ pkgs, inputs, ... }:

{
  imports = [
    "${inputs.nixpkgs}/nixos/modules/installer/sd-card/sd-image-aarch64.nix"
  ];

  boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_rpi3;
  hardware.enableRedistributableFirmware = true;

  networking.networkmanager.enable = true;

  services.openssh = {
    enable = true;
  };

For context, I found some issues related to this problem however none of the workarounds worked for me.

Yeah thats a problem, currently discussed in
Raspberry Pi 3B is missing wlan0 interface · Issue #115652 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub.

The only way I’m currently able to use my Raspberry Pi 3 B(?) is by
using nixos-21.05 and appliying the override shown in the first post of
the linked issue.

Oops just realised you already linked the issue, sorry.

The only way I’m currently able to use my Raspberry Pi 3 B(?) is by
using nixos-21.05 and appliying the override shown in the first post of
the linked issue.

This might solve the issue for me… I’ll see if using the kernel package from 21.05 works!

Please try:

  hardware.enableRedistributableFirmware = false;
  hardware.firmware = [ pkgs.firmwareLinuxNonfree ];

This works for me.

@cbley which version are you using? I’ve tested this with unstable and the latest stable to no success, unfortunately.

Hi @ratsclub , sorry for the late reply…

I am on nixos 21.11-small currently, and someone else on Github confirmed this also works when using raspberrypi firmware:

hardware.enableRedistributableFirmware = false;
hardware.firmware = [ pkgs.raspberrypiWirelessFirmware];

Maybe there is another module in your config that adds the firmware back? What is your dmesg output?

Look at the files in /run/current-system/firmware/brcm, where do these files link to? You need to avoid having files from firmwareLinuxNonfree and raspberrypiWirelessFirmware packages at the same time.

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Hmm… I deleted all my configurations and did what you sent here. It worked like a charm on nixos-unstable!

Thanks for the help!

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The Wiki should be updated with this.

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