Message-ID: <1366039892.8361.29.camel@jlt4.sipsolutions.net> (sfid-20130415_173143_983740_76981102)
Subject: Re: Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN rfkill always Soft blocked
From: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
To: Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>
Cc: schwaahed <schwaahed@gmail.com>, linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:31:32 +0200
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On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 09:39 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:

> > Yeah it seems not loaded, but how then does the soft block affect hard
> > block? All very odd, but almost certainly a platform rather than a wifi
> > issue. 
> 
> On my 2530p and a lot of other laptops, blocking the BIOS
> "switch" (either physically or softblock) hardblocks phy0.  I guess the
> BIOS twiddles a GPIO that's connected to the mPCI-E module's rfkill
> line/GPIO?

Yes, that seems to be the case. Something does, anyway, as the GPIO
state is pretty much directly reflected in the hard kill of the "phy0"
device.

> Which leads to the problem we've talked about a long time ago; you can't
> treat phy0 hardblock as a physical block that cannot be soft-unblocked,
> because some other switch might actually control it's state.  We tried
> to gray-out the "Enable Wireless" when hardblocked (since logically you
> can't soft-unblock something that's hardblocked), but it turns out you
> can't do that because unblocking BIOS switches might un-hardblock the
> phy0 wifi switch...  (and the kernel doesn't describe these
> dependencies, because, well, that's laptop-specific and would never be
> up-to-date).

Yeah ... best thing you could do is assume that if a bios rfkill exists
it controls the phy0 hard kill and in case it doesn't enable when you
unblock the bios device you pop up a message saying to switch the
physical button?

johannes