Re: NetworkManager and rf_kill

["Tomas Winkler" <tomasw gmail com>]

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 8:24 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 18:08 +0200, Khashayar Naderehvandi wrote:
>  > Hi list,
>  >
>  > When disabling wireless network using nm-applet, NM does not seem to
>  > disable the device (by means of /sys/class/net/wlan0/device/rf_kill).
>  > This is true both of the 0.6.6 version that Ubuntu Hardy ships and a
>  > quite recent svn build that I've compiled myself. The svn build is on
>  > a machine with the ipw2200 driver and the 0.6.6 version is on a
>  > machine which uses the iwlwifi driver on 4965 chipset.
>  >
>  > Is this a bug that I should report, or is it a not yet implemented
>  > feature?
>
>  NetworkManager marks the device as down, ie !IFF_UP.  Devices that are
>  marked down should enter the lowest possible power saving mode,
>  unfortunately that's not consistent behavior across drivers.  That's how
>  power-save works for wired devices and should work for wireless ones.
>  However, it turns out that there are some parts (iwlwifi for example)


>  that cannot detect rfkill unless firmware is loaded, which they do only
>  when the device is up.  To fix that, NM is going to switch to simply
>  turning off the TX power of the device.

This is only case for 3945 HW.
In any case moving device to rfkill will also
move it to very low power consumption. This devices were designed to
operate under other operating system in mind :)
Turning TX power of is currently equivalent to rfkill

>  Unfortunately, we need better support from HAL here, since HAL is not
>  quite verbose enough to tell NM that the radio is hardware-rfkilled or
>  software-rfkilled, which means NM can't know whether or not you can
>  re-enable the radio via software or whether the user actually flipped a
>  switch.

True some work need to be done here in distinction between SW and HW RF kill
It turns to be quite interesting state machine.
One of the problems to face is to preserve rfkill state after resume.
This have to be saved
in application level. - You don't want to resume your laptop in
airplane and crash it down because
you didn't closed the radio.. at least what they say you during safety
isnstructions

>  Once that is fixed, I'll flip NM over to turning off TX power and then
>  it will probably Just Work for you.


>  dan
>
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