Re: NetworkManager, ASUS led

[Howard Chu <hyc symas com>]

Larry Finger wrote:
> Dan Williams wrote:
> > 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.

OK, that makes sense. I'm still running 2.6.22.x on my laptop but I'll look 
into what 2.6.24 is doing.

> Which flavor of wireless card is in that Acer? The b43 driver uses the
rfkill layer to handle the
> wireless LED. It took a bit of fiddling to get it all to work as Michael
Buesch (the one that added
> rfkill to b43) does not have hardware with such a LED. All the requisite
stuff made it to mainline
> at 2.6.24-rc5 (or so). It works with NM or with if-up on my HP laptop.

My Asus M6800Ne is using the Intel 2200. Thanks for the info.
--
  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP     http://www.openldap.org/project/