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T480 Hackintosh: DW1560 loses Wi-Fi association during sleep; would a DW1830 / BCM43602 fix WWEN?

I’m running macOS Catalina 10.15.8 on a ThinkPad T480 with OpenCore.

Current Wi-Fi card:

  • Dell DW1560 / BCM4352 (BCM94352Z)
  • PCI ID: 14e4:43b1
  • Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirDrop and Handoff all work
  • AirportBrcmFixup is used because 43b1 is not natively listed by Catalina’s AirPortBrcmNIC personality

The remaining issue is Wi-Fi after sleep.

On the T480, when entering sleep I consistently get:

AirPort_Brcm43xx::powerChange: System Sleep AirPort: Link Down on en1. Reason 8 (Disassociated because station leaving) AirPort_Brcm43xx::syncPowerState: WWEN[disabled] 

After wake, Wi-Fi takes roughly 4 seconds to reassociate.

I compared this directly with a real 2015 MacBook Pro running Catalina. Its Apple BCM43602 (14e4:43ba) behaves differently:

AirPort_Brcm43xx::powerChange: System Sleep platformWoWEnable: WWEN[enable] syncPowerState: WWEN[enabled] 

The MacBook keeps its infrastructure association during sleep and Wi-Fi is effectively available immediately after wake.

I’ve already tested the following on a separate recovery EFI, without touching my working internal EFI:

  • -brcmfxwowl; no improvement
  • forcing AirPort_Brcm4360 with brcmfx-driver=1; still WWEN[disabled]
  • spoofing the DW1560 as 43a0; reproducible kernel panic inside com.apple.driver.AirPort.BrcmNIC

I also compared IORegistry between both systems. Most relevant properties are identical:

mDNS_Keepalive = Yes APFeatures = 1 IOFeatures = 8 IOPowerManagement CapabilityFlags = 61440 

The notable difference is:

MacBook / BCM43602: IOEthernetWakeOnLANFilterGroup = 1 T480 / DW1560: IOEthernetWakeOnLANFilterGroup = 0 

I’m considering replacing the DW1560 with a Dell DW1830 / BCM943602BAED, since it uses a real BCM43602 / 14e4:43ba, much closer to the Apple card in the MacBook Pro.

Has anyone specifically tested a DW1830 in a ThinkPad T480 under Catalina and checked whether the Wi-Fi association is retained during sleep?

I’m especially interested in actual sleep logs showing either:

WWEN[enabled] 

or

WWEN[disabled] 

rather than just “Wi-Fi works”.

If the DW1830 also disconnects during sleep on a T480, that would suggest the limitation is more related to the T480 platform/PCIe/ACPI implementation than to the DW1560 itself.

Source: r/thinkpad · by /u/VicHalen07

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