Re: NetworkManager and rf_kill

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 17:46 +0200, Khashayar Naderehvandi wrote:
> I really might be misunderstanding something here, but deactivating
> wireless through nm-applet should in fact (as things are currently
> with NM from svn), do a ifconfig wlan0 down? Is this correct? Because
> doing that manually, my wifi doesn't suck battery power anymore.
> However, nm-applet seems to take down the wireless device _only_ when
> I deactivate network completely, that is, when I deactivate wireless,
> wired and GSM capabilities. Only deactivating wireless leaves the
> device up, and hence reduces uptime on battery.

We do need to mark the device down when it's disabled; that somehow went
away when rewriting the device state handling.  Should be a pretty easy
fix in
nm-device-802-11-wireless.c::nm_device_802_11_wireless_set_enabled().

I was going to change that code to set the TX power of the card off
instead of taking it down, because some hardware (iwl3945) needs
firmware loaded to notice rfkill changes, and setting the device down
unloads the firmware.  So at least on some devices you need to always
keep the card up.  But HAL isn't smart enough yet to distinguish between
soft rfkill and hard rfkill, so setting TX power off, to HAL, looks just
like a hard rfkill and you can't turn the rf back on in software :(
That's a fairly easy patch to HAL though.

Dan