[RFC PATCH] libertas: turn radio off when down

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2007-11-20 at 23:38 -0600, elw at stderr.org wrote:
> 
> Question.
> 
> How is this intended to interact with the mesh connectivity intended for 
> the laptops?  I'm of the understanding that the mesh being powered and on 
> is more or less a baseline design feature of the XO-as-platform.

Yes, though for the first gen machines it's likely that more aggressive
power management will be required than was originally thought.  However,
see my mail to Ashish for more detail.

> Or is this an "airplane mode" feature that's going to get a button-push or 
> other widget activation to activate?

Mostly for airplane mode, and to turn off the power when the device
isn't being used at all.  When both interfaces are marked down, you
can't pass any traffic through the device anyway.  There are cases where
mesh forwarding is desirable but the machine is asleep for longer
periods of time, in these cases there is no real reason to close the
device anyway.

Dan

> I fully support the notion of making it possible to quickly and easily 
> disable the radio, as well as mesh-y bits, saving power and reducing RF in 
> situations where one is either clearly out-of-contact or prohibited from 
> emitting excess RF energy, but I would want it to be:
> 
> 1) very difficult to do by accident
> 
> 2) give some indication that the radio is currently off, making it easy to
>     quickly re-enable the radio.
> 
> What's the plan for UI for this?
> 
> --elijah
> 
> 
> On Wed, 21 Nov 2007, James Cameron wrote:
> 
> > Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:26:57 +1100
> > From: James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org>
> > To: Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com>
> > Cc: Andres Salomon <dilinger at queued.net>, devel at laptop.org,
> >     Brajesh Dave <brajeshd at marvell.com>
> > Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] libertas: turn radio off when down
> > 
> > On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 11:18:07PM -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> >> This should allow NetworkManager to be told to go to sleep, at which
> >> point it will mark all devices down, and with this patch should turn off
> >> the radio and save power.
> >
> > Good.
> >
> >> Comments?
> >
> > Very slight possibility of further factorisation seen, but probably not
> > worth it.  Otherwise it seemed to make sense.  Is it in a build yet?
> >
> > Acked-by: James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org>
> >
> >