rfkill vs. HAL, 2.6.27-rc3

From: Jim Paris
Date: Wed Aug 13 2008 - 03:04:10 EST


On my Thinkpad X61, I have lots of problems on 2.6.26.1 when toggling
rfkill switches and buttons, including kernel crashes, so I'm trying
out 2.6.27-rc3. Rfkill seems much better behaved, but Network-manager
is not very happy with it and no longer notices when the radio is
killed.

I think this is because it uses the HAL killswitch interface
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.KillSwitch
which calls the script
hal-system-killswitch-get-power
which calls
hal-system-killswitch-get-power-linux
which uses the binary
hal-ipw-killswitch-linux
to check
/sys/class/net/wlan0/device/rf_kill.

But this file no longer exists. It seems to have been renamed to
"/sys/class/net/wlan0/device/rfkill:rfkill2", which is extra annoying
because it's not just a rename, now hal-ipw-killswitch-linux will have
to find the "rfkill2" suffix.

Seems like a kernel regression if upgrading breaks user applications.
Or does this sound like a HAL bug? Or Network-manager? Or..?

(tracking a single bit of state is getting way too complex these
days...)

-jim
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