Re: [patch] make NM survice a HAL restart

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 19:06 +0100, Nikolaus Filus wrote:
> On Thursday 15 December 2005 18:51, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 12:04 -0500, Robert Love wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 14:45 +0100, Timo Hoenig wrote:
> > > > Personally I'd go for the first approach.
> > >
> > > Me too.
> > >
> > > And this is great.  Dan?
> >
> > Yeah, first one looks better to me as well.
> >
> > One thing to keep in mind; when HAL starts back up again, what if the
> > device list is different?  We should eventually have some code to grab
> > the device list from the restarted HAL, diff it against our internal
> > list, and add/remove devices that have changed.  ie, HAL dies and in
> > the interim you remove your PCCard.  Right now we're screwed.
> 
> That remembers me of some problems having with NM.
> Before I was used to name my wirelss wlan0 instead of eth0 using
> ifrename. Can NM handle this scenarion at runtime?

If the rename happens before NM starts running, it should work.
Internally NM uses the devices name because most Linux ioctl() calls
simply require it.  The applet at least tries as hard as possible to not
show "eth0" or "wlan0" to the user, because those mean nothing.  So in
theory to a general user of NM, your device could be called
"adfadfadfaweyewyasdgd0" and it should be fine.

If you switch the device names out from underneath NM, stuff won't work
though.  I'm unaware of how userspace apps are supposed to be notified
of a device's name change (netlink perhaps?).  In the future we likely
need to deal with this though, or at least make HAL deal with it and
then have NM update its info when the HAL property changes.

> Another problem is, that NM still shows scan results, after switching
> my wireless radio off. Shouldn't it disable wireless?

Yes, but the access point list sticks around for 3 minutes or so after a
scan.  The applet actually does this now (patch from Robert while back I
believe), when you disable wireless it will remove the wireless
interface from the menu and put it back when you re-enable wireless.

Dan