Re: NetworkManager, ASUS led

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Howard Chu wrote:

> Following up on this thread
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-devel&m=120099366404038&w=2
> 
> KDE's kwifimanager was explicitly patched to toggle the Wireless LED on/off on 
> Asus notebooks. It seems that the function really belongs in NetworkManager 
> instead. I patched my copy of NetworkManager 0.6.5 to add the function, the 
> patch is attached. It's probably not the cleanest approach, but it works for me.

No, this function belongs in the kernel or in HAL.  Ideally the ASUS bits that 
keep track of rfkill need to be talking to the wireless LED too, or the bits 
that actually kill the wireless (right now that's callouts from HAL if the 
switch isn't hardwired to the card or handled in BIOS) need to do this.  
NetworkManager certainly isn't going to be coding workarounds for every laptop 
vendor to toggle stuff like the wireless LED.  It really needs to be handled at 
a lower level than that.

There's an rfkill layer in the kernel that stuff can use, and there's also an 
LED framework (though I'm not sure if that's generic or specific to only WLAN 
cards).  If the ASUS LED is truly a software LED, then there need to be asus 
specific callouts in HAL (or the asus ACPI module should hook into the rfkill 
framework and toggle it from there) to handle this, not NetworkManager.

Dan