Testing the Wireless driver changes

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 10:33 -0500, Michail Bletsas wrote:
> Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote on 01/18/2008 10:08:09 AM:
> 
> > On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 08:36 +0800, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 19:16 -0500, Giannis Galanis wrote:
> > > > It must be noted that the important issue of this discussion is 
> > how to have
> > > > the radio blocked from BEFORE the XO boots, so as not to be 
> > conflicting with
> > > > the airline regulations.
> > > 
> > > We should change the firmware so that it isn't active automatically as
> > > soon as it's loaded -- let the driver activate it when it's 
> appropriate.
> > > Then the decision as to whether the radio is blocked can properly be
> > > handled in userspace, and the device can be left quiescent if
> > > appropriate.
> > 
> > Yes.  The active antennas firmware would need to be slightly altered to
> > start on firmware boot, but the normal XO firmware should certainly be
> > radio-off-until-driver-enabled (by setting IFF_UP or device open).
> > 
> So let's alter a fundamental design principle so that the XO doesn't 
> transmit a single frame when riding an airplane... ??
> 
> I don't think so. If people feel so strong about this they can always 
> block firmware loading.
> Mesh forwarding will go on when you initialize the adapter and it is up to 
> the user to turn it off if they feel that they have too.

We're not really arguing here, we agree.  Everyone agrees that wireless
+mesh should start automatically by default after bootup.  What David
(and I in like 3 mails yesterday in this thread already) had proposed
was that the XO firmware should disable the radio _until_Linux_loads_
and the driver tells it to enable the radio.  When Linux loads, the
driver (or NetworkManager, or whatever) starts the radio.  That way, the
user at least has a change to at some point say "no, don't turn on the
radio by default" if they want to.

_Nothing_ would change for users who do not want/care/need to touch the
radio in this scenario, everything would continue to work as it
currently does.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that we're saying it should all be
in airplane mode all the time unless the child explicitly turns the
radio on.  We're saying exactly the opposite of that.

Dan