Re: NetworkManager and rf_kill

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 22:17 +0200, Khashayar Naderehvandi wrote:
> 
>         
>         
>         
>         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.
>         
> Hmpf. That's a bummer. Like so many times before, I really wish I
> could code.
> Hope this gets fixed someday soon.
> 
> And again, thanks a lot for your elaborate explanations!

I at least restored the previous behavior of marking the device down
when wireless is disabled; svn r3666.  Again, most drivers should be
entering low-power state when down, since you're not expected to be able
to do much of anything in !IFF_UP state anyway, irregardless of any
other setting of txpower.

Dan