[OLPC Networking] Testing the Wireless driver changes

Giannis Galanis giannisgalanis at gmail.com
Thu Jan 17 19:16:08 EST 2008


It is included in http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wireless_Driver_README
and if it helps i believe it was removed around september i believe.

It was definitely an active ioctl.

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.

Renaming usb8388.bin works fine, and as expected is kept even after the
reboot(just checked to be sure).
We just need to include it in sugar-control-panel or smth.

When testing in the lab, it is not important which method is the more
appropriate since all cover our need of a turned off radio.

But, still this involves "only documenting" a method for silencing the
radio, so we are legally covered.
In fact, the FAA has a law only on operating in the 800mhz band on an
airplane.
The airlines, based on that  law, developed  regulations that cover all
mobile phones/ wireless devices for reasons of simplification.
What i wanna say, is that as far as we are concerned it perfectly safe and
lawful to use an XO with mesh on, chat and any other stuff on a plane. And
if we wanna play "extra safe" we simply turn the radio off after the reboot.




On Jan 17, 2008 6:26 PM, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:

>
> On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 12:32 -0500, Michail Bletsas wrote:
> > There is an "iwpriv eth0 radiooff/radioon" IOCTL hook in the firmware
> > which was meant to control the radio power directly - it was removed a
> few
> > months ago since it wasn't considered to its thing in the "proper" linux
> > manner.
>
> I looked for it and I couldn't find it. Please could you point me at the
> commit in which it was removed? I'm not entirely sure it ever made it
> into our driver. Certainly it never made it into the upstream driver,
> and the upstream driver is all that really matters, in the long term.
>
> > ** I don't know how "iwconfig eth0 txpower off" is implemented, if it
> > uses the same IOCTL with "iwpriv eth0 radiooff", then it is doing the
> > right thing.
>
> It uses CMD_802_11_RADIO_CONTROL with the RADIO_OFF argument, which I
> believe is the correct thing to do.
>
> --
> dwmw2
>
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>
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