Re: [RFC] b43: rework rfkill code

Matthew Garrett
2008-12-10T17:51:09Z

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 06:37:23PM +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:

> Ok. I think the fundamental flaw here is assuming that there's just a
> single state. There isn't. The device can be turned off in hardware (in
> which case sw won't be able do anything about it, but we want to know)
> or in software (which we want to handle). Pretending that there's just a
> single state that's either hw-off, sw-off or on is plain wrong. The
> device can be hw-off and sw-off at the same time, and then if you turn
> off the hw-off button it won't turn on (however, unless your system
> integrator totally screwed up, you won't have a hw and a sw button on
> your system)

They may not be physical buttons, but we can often control this anyway.
For instance, my HP has a button that will perform a hardware disable of
the wifi card. However, I can control that button's state through
software with the hp-wmi driver. The way we currently handle that (and,
I think, the only way we *can* handle that) is to provide two separate
rfkill interfaces - one tied to the wireless device, one tied to the
platform device.

--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org