Re: NetworkManager, ASUS led

[Larry Finger <larry finger lwfinger net>]

Dan Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Howard Chu wrote:
> 
>> Following up on this thread
>> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-devel&m=120099366404038&w=2
>>
>> KDE's kwifimanager was explicitly patched to toggle the Wireless LED on/off on 
>> Asus notebooks. It seems that the function really belongs in NetworkManager 
>> instead. I patched my copy of NetworkManager 0.6.5 to add the function, the 
>> patch is attached. It's probably not the cleanest approach, but it works for me.
> 
> No, this function belongs in the kernel or in HAL.  Ideally the ASUS bits that 
> keep track of rfkill need to be talking to the wireless LED too, or the bits 
> that actually kill the wireless (right now that's callouts from HAL if the 
> switch isn't hardwired to the card or handled in BIOS) need to do this.  
> NetworkManager certainly isn't going to be coding workarounds for every laptop 
> vendor to toggle stuff like the wireless LED.  It really needs to be handled at 
> a lower level than that.
> 
> There's an rfkill layer in the kernel that stuff can use, and there's also an 
> LED framework (though I'm not sure if that's generic or specific to only WLAN 
> cards).  If the ASUS LED is truly a software LED, then there need to be asus 
> specific callouts in HAL (or the asus ACPI module should hook into the rfkill 
> framework and toggle it from there) to handle this, not NetworkManager.

Which flavor of wireless card is in that Acer? The b43 driver uses the rfkill layer to handle the
wireless LED. It took a bit of fiddling to get it all to work as Michael Buesch (the one that added
rfkill to b43) does not have hardware with such a LED. All the requisite stuff made it to mainline
at 2.6.24-rc5 (or so). It works with NM or with if-up on my HP laptop.

Larry