Re: NM tidbits

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Hi ~

Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Clearly NM has the brains to do this itself and perhaps it should, at
> > least when running battery. That's part of the point why we're making NM
> > the single entity that controls networking. Sure, this leaves all the
> > uhm people who like to configure their system to the last bit out in the
> > cold but as pointed out repeatedly their are not the main audience for
> > NM [1].
> >
> > As a general rule of thumbwWe should never invent options when we can do
> > the right thing automatically. Vote no on the "disable networking"
> > proposition.
>
> Presumably, it would power down wireless when connected by wire?  Are 
> there other cases where you might want both?  There are certainly cases 
> where you would want neither, even when in range of a WAP.  And of 
> course, if I don't have wire, but I'm running on battery, I may want 
> wireless anyway.
>
> I'm having a bit of trouble imagining a state diagram that doesn't have 
> at least one human-activated switch in it.

If I remember correctly we made the decision to do scans every so often 
to keep the access point list updated.  This helps the case where you 
disconnect and want to be on wireless right away after that.  With out 
the scanning it would take a while to scan for an available AP and then 
connect to it.  There is a 'low power scanning' for when you're on 
battery and should conserve power in as many ways as possible for NM.

I'm not sure if g-p-m has power management modes or policies, maybe 
David can answer that.  But if you're really looking to squeeze the most 
battery life out of your system then presumably you'd use a "Maximize 
Battery Life" policy which NetworkManager would react to and attempt to 
conserve as much power as it could in that case.

Cheers,
~ Bryan