On Sunday 07 February 2010 15:09:05 Rafał Miłecki wrote: > W dniu 7 lutego 2010 14:22 użytkownik Michael Buesch <m...@bu3sch.de> napisał: > > On Sunday 07 February 2010 14:18:43 Rafał Miłecki wrote: > >> So pressing something like Fn+FX can eventually be handled by BIOS and > >> can cause hardware (physical) enabling radio? > > > > Yeah, could be the case. It could also be handled by another kernel driver > > (wmi). > > In no case will the wireless driver be able to modify the state. > > > >> In such a case Broadcom hardware doesn't know about this (wow, that's > >> weird), and so b43 driver doesn't know as well? As the result b43 > >> doesn't try to run wireless. > > > > Well, the only thing the driver can do is _observing_ that the radio is > > killed. > > Hm, AFAIR my old Acer Aspire 5024 was using acer-wmi module to manage > (turn off) rfkill. I was using this with b43 driver so somehow in my > case b43 (and hardware?) did know state of radio state... But you > wrote: > > > But that's done by other means (BIOS) and the broadcom hardware doesn't > > know about it > > so finally... when we are able to know rfkill status and when we are > not? Is this like following? > 1) If BIOS handles rfkill we don't know status of radio and radio > doesn't know as well > 2) If something like WMI handles rfkill, we know status of radio > ?
We always know about the status of the radio (rfkill). We just can't modify it from within the broadcom device. The rfkill signal is a physical signal that goes into the broadcom radio. If that signal is turned to "kill" by the BIOS, there's nothing the broadcom chip can do about it. It will just show the state of that physical line to the driver via a bit in a register or via IRQ. So if rfkill can be switched by software, that is totally unrelated to b43. It's done by completely unrelated hardware registers that are not on the broadcom device or by other means (BIOS calls, etc...). -- Greetings, Michael. _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list Bcm43xx-dev@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
