Subject: Re: Hardware button support for Wireless cards

From: Dan Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 15:12:50 -0400

On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 18:01 +0200, Michael Buesch wrote:
> On Monday 15 May 2006 17:27, you wrote:
> > [email-masked] said:
> > > Some people are saying that instead of throwing and ACPI event we should be
> > > either use hotplug or internally just disable the radio and somehow inform
> > > the dscape stack that the radio has been disabled.
> > >
> > > What are peoples thoughts here, should we 
> > >
> > > A. be handling this within our drivers and doing "what the user expects" and
> > > disabling the hardware radio, or 
> > 
> > On my HP laptop with bcm43xx wireless, the button disables the radio in
> > HARDWARE, and afaict the driver has no idea about it. The driver notices
> > that it's not connected and happily starts scanning again, unaware that
> > anything is wrong.
> 
> There are registers on the bcm43xx chip (0x158 and 0x49A) that indicate
> some "Radio is hardware-disabled" state. We currently don't use that flag
> correctly in the driver. Could you please assist me on testing if your switch
> actually toggles the bit?
> I think best place for this would be on irc.freenode.net #bcm-users

When those bits get set in the register, is the radio already disabled?
ie, for the bcm43xx chip, is it really force-disabled by the button, or
does the driver have some control?

Dan