asus-wmi: wlan rfkill on eee pc 1015PEM possible regression?

asus-wmi: wlan rfkill on eee pc 1015PEM possible regression?

[Murray Campbell]

Hi,

I have an ASUS Eee PC 1015PEM and, on upgrading from kernel 3.5.7 to
3.6.11 noticed that the rfkill behaviour stopped working the way I was
expecting.

I have git-bisect-ed it down to the following commit:

a50bd128f28cf81c1250874fc53728e113f12957

which certainly looks relevant.

I first noticed the problem because the WLAN rfkill toggle button
(Fn+F2) stopped toggling the WLAN LED.  Also, it won't enable the WLAN
if it is disabled in the BIOS.

Prior to the change 'rfkill list' would show two devices: 0: "asus-wlan"
and 1: "phy0".  Using either the button or 'rfkill (un)block all' would
toggle the blocked state from "no,no; no,no" to "yes,no; yes,yes" where
each pair is soft/hard and the first pair is the asus-wlan, the second
the phy0.  Each time the phy0 hard block status would take a second or
two to change.

This worked regardless of the state in the BIOS and would appropriately
toggle the WLAN LED.

After the commit the two devices are switched: phy0 is number 0 and
asus-wlan is number 1.  The hard block status of both devices is
impossible to change with either 'rfkill' or the button.  The asus-wlan
device is always not hard-blocked,  the phy0 hard-block always keeps the
status assigned in the BIOS.  The soft-block state changes
appropriately.  The WLAN LED never changes.

If the WLAN is disabled in the BIOS it is never possible to enable it
without a reboot and I am wondering if the device is ever switched off
properly if it is enabled in the BIOS.

Is this expected behaviour?  If not I am more than willing to
investigate further if anyone can suggest a line of enquiry.

Thank you,

Murray Campbell <murray@sonology.net>