How to fix brcmfmac error causing Fedora to hang during Reboot or Shutdown

29 June 2018 Linux 2 mins read

I thought I'll give Fedora a try on as my Media PC, everything was working fine until I rebooted and it just wouldn't get past shutting down Fedora services.

When clicking Shutdown or Reboot from Fedora (Currently Fedora 28) I would get the usual process that Fedora would use to reboot the system but then I receive a quick flash on an error - or warning - message and then the Fedora logo which would not go away.

kernel: brcmfmac: brcmf_inetaddr_changed: fail to get arp ip table err:-52

At first look it seems that it's an issue with my Broadcom based Wireless adapter - even Googling the error message showed me other people that are having the same issue where Fedora will hang.

One recommendation was to disable the network adapter before ending your session, but this wasn't the best solution for my mostly headless setup as I wouldn't want to access my PC via HDMI just to re-enable the adapater.

What I did find was that disabling Firewalld solved the issue, this was amazing! Especially after wasted hours of figuring this out.

So what I did was to disable the firewall completely.

sudo systemctl stop firewalld
sudo systemctl disable firewalld

This allowed me to reboot perfectly fine without any issue, but I didn't want to run the Fedora without a firewall so I gave UFW a shot. It ships with Ubuntu and is actually a lot easier to use than FirewallD.

sudo dnf install ufw
sudo systemctl enable ufw
sudo systemctl start ufw

Now you have UFW set up to manage your network without the Broadcom drivers getting in the way.

I understand that this isn't a fix but more of a workaround - I'm happy that it's all working and UFW works just as well.

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Sandeep Bansal
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