iwlwifi working anytime soon?

[Michael E Brown]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 07:50:00PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 17:28 -0500, Michael E Brown wrote:
> > Dell systems can use dellWirelessCtl -> userspace binary to control
> > wireless kill switch. This binary is in libsmbios-bins, currently in
> > Fedora 7 and Fedora Extras for FC6.
> > 
> > David Zeuthen recently committed support into HAL to interface with
> > dellWirelessCtl, so Dell laptops should soon work ok. Contact David if
> > you have a Dell laptop of recent vintage (dellWirelessCtl -i to see if
> > it works on your box) and it doesnt 'just work'.
> 
> There is a standard kernel interface for killswitches that is getting
> close to complete.  There's a disgusting number of kill switch
> implementations [1] that it has to support, but it appears to do the
> job.  Eventually, all vendor-specific stuff needs to be ported to use
> it, which shouldn't be too hard.  HAL then needs to be hooked up to
> that, and NetworkManager will just use the generic HAL interfaces to
> deal with rfkill.
> 
Why do we need a kernel interface for this? Why not libkillswitch.so.1
and /usr/lib/killswitch-plugins/? Then, you could write
libsysfskillswitch.so.1 and drop it into the plugins directory, and I
could write libdellkillswitch.so.1 and drop it into the plugins
directory.

I dont see the utility of having a kernel driver for this when 99.9% of
the code I need to implement my killswitch control for Dell laptops is
userspace. I only need the 'dcdbas' driver to run the SMI call to
enable/disable. The rest of the code I need, reading the smbios table to
get the Dell proprietary tables structures which tell me the index io
port for the SMI and the magic value for the SMI all happily resides in
userspace. (The dcdbas driver is a driver to run SMIs)

> [1] Including:
> - Button triggers ACPI events from BIOS

dell kill switch might do this, I dont know.

> - Button is just another input layer (ie vendor-specific keyboard)
> button

this is part of how the Dell one works (I see keypress events when you
toggle it)

> - Button wired directly to baseband processor antenna path

and it does this for wireless

> - Button toggles GPIO which sends signal to driver which kills RF
> - Button is a dual-state toggle rather than an up/down button
> - Button toggles USB power to module, drops off USB bus like hot-unplug

and it does this for bluetooth

And the other thing about the Dell killswitch, you can set it in
software to control any combination of WLAN, WWAN, and Bluetooth. Ie. I
can tell BIOS that kill switch *only* enables/disables bluetooth.

--
Michael