Re: BUG: NM only connects the third time

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 12:35 +0100, Eric Brunet lps ens fr wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 10:54:49AM +0000, Rui Tiago Matos wrote:
> > On 11/2/07, Eric Brunet lps ens fr <Eric Brunet lps ens fr> wrote:
> > > That would help if libsmbios is present but the driver is not loaded. The
> > > problem here is that libsmbios was not installed (I had never heard of
> > > it, and it is not installed by default). In that case, the error message
> > > gives no useful hint about what is going on.
> > 
> > That's odd, because on Fedora 7, the hal rpm depends on the libsmbios-libs rpm.
> > 
> Maybe, but dellWirelessCtl is present in the libsmbios-bin rpm, and
> that's the binary that NM is trying to call.

Well, that's what _HAL_ is trying to call.  NM knows nothing about
dellWirelessCtl, the problem is that when HAL adds the killswitch device
to it's global device list, it doesn't make sure that the
dellWirelessCtl binary exists or is usable.  If it didn't add the rfkill
device when dellWirelessCtl was present, you wouldn't have this problem.

The current rfkill stuff in HAL is a workaround to the real problem;
there isn't a coherent rfkill layer in the kernel that drivers can hook
into, and therefore NM has to poll the device to figure out what the
state is.  That is somewhat fixed with 2.6.24 kernels, and as more
drivers begin to hook into the rfkill layer, thinks will get better.

Dan