Subject: Re: iwl rfkill suddenly dropped to hard block

From: Evgeniy Polyakov <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 06:22:47 +0300

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 03:11:27PM -0500, John W. Linville ([email-masked]) wrote:
> Cc'ing linux-wireless and Wey-Yi...
> 
> To be honest, nearly every report of "suddenly my rfkill is stuck
> on" is because the laptop has multiple rfkill keys, usually with
> one of them a slider along the edge of the case.  In particular,
> Thinkpads have such switches.  The slider gets accidently engaged
> (possibly while the laptop is being transported or somesuch) and
> suddenly wireless stops working.
> 
> Please check for the above.  If you are sure that isn't the case, then
> please try to determine the last working kernel and do a bisection --
> hopefully you don't have to go all the way back to 2.6.33!

I'm pretty sure it would be that simple if there was such a slider.

There is no way I can bisect this problem since, first, i915 does not
work anywhere after 2.6.34 upto current git tree, and second, because
wifi perfectly well worked two days ago with this kernel, and now there
are no good and bad kernels, only bad ones.

Turning on dell_wmi brings 2 more rfkill classes, which are both
hard and soft blocked. Both can not be unblocked (even soft unblock),
although reported case can be soft unblocked (hard block status
obviously does not change). Actually by default it is soft unblocked,
other two (another wifi switch and bluetooth) are both hard and soft
blocked.

I would imagine this is just related to some dellish crap, but I saw a
number of exactly the same cases in the web including linux-kernel mail
lists in the past and also without 'slider on the back' case.

-- 
	Evgeniy Polyakov