Re: howto ignore rfkill switch

[Marcel Holtmann <marcel holtmann org>]

Hi Dan,

> > Well, actually in the case of the OP, the switch has nothing to do
> > with the PCMCIA card, and the card is still on, available and
> > configurable by hand (iwconfig, ifconfig) when the switch is off. It
> > is just NM that decides to disable all wireless possibility even if
> > the switch concerns only the internal card.
> 
> You've flipped the rfkill switch, thus you do not want to use wifi.  If
> you do actually want to use wifi, there are other, better mechanisms to
> just kill the card you don't want to use.  rfkill is *not* the mechanism
> to disable a specific card completely.

it actually is the right way to kill a specific WiFi card. It is not
that useful if you have platform switches in your system that interact
with hotplug, but RFKILL works on a per device and all devices basis. At
least the re-write coming with 2.6.31 does this correctly.

The hardware RFKILL button/switch on your laptop needs to be tied into a
userspace policy to decide what to do with external devices. That is out
of the scope of the Linux kernel.

Regards

Marcel