On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Tomas Winkler wrote: > In practice the rfkill in WiFi comes to 2 common cases > HW|SW > > Most of the world SW and HW are independent states and radio is > enabled only in 0|0 > 0|1 > / \ > 0|0 - - 1|1 > \ / > 1|0 Indeed. And it is like that, because that's how WiFi hardware with hardware rfkill input lines work in the bare metal. > Dell Only - Unblocking HW rfkill enabled radio. > 0|1 > / \ > 0|0 -- <-HW- - 1|1 > \ / > 1|0 This is likely Dell's crap of a firmware getting in the way. Still, does the Dell firmware interferes just when the HW rfkill input line changes state (i.e. on edges), or all the time? > This is why all vendors (including iwlwifi) that targets notebook and > friends markets need to implement independent SW HW rfkill switches > and we need 2 bits (4 states- 3 states are not enought I've wrote > that couple of times.... You need two bits inside the drivers, yes. However, the core interface (rfkill) does not. It has a different point of view, one that is driven by the needs of the interface and userspace applications, and not by hardware implementation. The rfkill core has three states: 0 - Radio blocked, but could be unblocked by software request 1 - Radio unblocked, can always be blocked by software request 2 - Radio blocked and locked, software request cannot unblock it These states are defined by the valid [for rfkill] combinations of two SEMANTHIC parameters: "the current state can be changed by the rfkill->toggle_radio() callback" and "transmitter is currently emmiting energy". There is no fourth state, because a radio locked into unblocked mode is completely unacceptable for rfkill: it is against all safety regulations for the kind of wireless transmitter rfkill is concerned with. The reason why the underlying wireless driver can or cannot change the transmitter state through rfkill->toggle_radio() is NOT important to the rfkill core. And if it were, IMHO we would be better off by exporting that as a separate attribute, and not messing with the rfkill states. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
