[Debian-eeepc-devel] rfkill, eeepc-laptop, and ath9k

Kevin Goodsell kevin-opensource at omegacrash.net
Tue Dec 8 20:50:33 UTC 2009


I know this isn't really an ACPI issue but it must affect the ACPI 
scripts, and I haven't been able to find any useful information anywhere 
else, so I'm wondering what if anything you guys know about it.

The problem as I understand it, is that eeepc-laptop and ath9k both 
provide an rfkill interface for the wifi device. These two interfaces 
are different somehow and don't play nice together. On my 1005HA running 
Squeeze I had to write a new script to handle wifi toggling at least 
somewhat reliably. To turn off wifi, the script unloads ath9k and writes 
0 to the eeepc-wlan rfkill interface. To turn wifi back on, it writes 1 
to the eeepc-wlan rfkill interface, modprobes ath9k, sleeps for 5 
seconds, then writes 1 to ath9k's rfkill interface.

Does anyone have any idea why we have these two rfkill interfaces, what 
the "right" way to handle this is, and/or whether anyone is planning on 
fixing this? I find surprisingly little about the problem by googling.

Thanks.

-Kevin



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