Re: howto ignore rfkill switch

[Marcel Holtmann <marcel holtmann org>]

Hi Brian,

> >> rfkill is *not* the mechanism to disable a specific card completely.
> > 
> > Yes it is.
> > 
> > A hardware switch is great. It is so more intuitive than any software
> > interface, since it just looks like the good old ON/OFF button that
> > everybody understands since they were three years old. By making one
> > single button act on multiple unrelated devices you try to make the
> > machine too clever and leave the fundamental ON/OFF analogy behind.
> 
> It might be great if you actually have a hardware switch, a lot of
> machines do not. My laptop uses Fn-F2 and that disables Wi-Fi and
> Bluetooth simultaneously but not by cutting the power to them or by
> toggling an enable line to the radios. It does it by some sort of
> software mechanism.
> 
> 
> > This ON/OFF analogy is so fundamental that most users do not even
> > suspect it is an analogy! They simply think that the button is actually
> > hard-wired to the device. "Cool, a hardware button!  Finally something
> > simple and reliable to switch off all this complex and buggy software!".
> 
> Or "Damn! Why the hell can't I switch off my WiFi and leave my Bluetooth
> active so I can use my mouse?"

that is actually the fault of the old RFKILL input stuff in the kernel.
It was wrong and we will be moving this to userspace. So you can
actually toggle between it with visual feedback to the user.

Let me repeat, every RFKILL before the 2.6.31 kernel was a complete
cluster-fuck, heavily complicated and just plain wrong. Check the
linux-wireless mailing list archive if you have a day or so. There are
quite a few posts about it :)

Regards

Marcel