What is the proper way to turn wlan on/off? Other wlan questions.

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Thu Dec 18 20:55:06 CET 2008


Andy Green wrote:
> Yeah I gathered that from the name ;-)  But WLAN with RF down is a
> chocolate teapot, we don't have Monitor and you can't ACK.  So it's OK
> to overload it as meaning "take WLAN down".

The rfkill documentation quite strongly suggests that only a real
rfkill switch or controller should even think about using the rfkill
interface. So I'm not certain if a "pretend rfkill" implementation
would be all that welcome, even though it would be quite close in
terms of behaviour. I'll ask on the wireless list.

Regarding having a knob to take WLAN down, I already replied to
Paul that he really needs to have an abstraction there. There's
nothing nearly uniform enough for applications or middleware to
attempt to achieve this effect through a single kernel interface.
(If Android uses rfkill as synonymous to power saving, that would
be a bug.)

A good example for something that would fit in the rfkill design,
we could look at our GSM switch. This one controls transmit power
and is completely oblivious to what the rest of the modem does.

> I'm pretty sure asking it at high level and leaving it up is the way to
> try first, either Atheros guys direct or via Matt told this.

Sounds good, thanks.

- Werner



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