[ltp] Wireless hardware radio switch does not work on X60s

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Wed, 30 May 2007, r8scq7b02@sneakemail.com wrote:
> Yes. Wireless is working fine, switch is in off position. I even played around 
> with it turning it back and forth but nothing happened. And I must say that 
> it is very poor engineering. It is _very_ difficult to slide it back and 
> forth the way it is intended with finger over the switch, but _too easy_ to 
> switch it when pushing it from the two tiny edges. It almost makes me think 
> it is loose and broken.

Hmm, we need a report from someone else with an Atheros card to know for
sure, then.

> > Lenovo is not IBM, and doesn't even come close.  I wish I could say they
> > are working at it, but I don't see that, either.
> 
> What do you mean by this? Is Lenovo doing a poor job at documentation? Do you 

Yes.

> both, which is too bad. I still think that hardware (not compatibility) wise 
> they make the best machines on the market.

We have already lost the good displays to Lenovo.

Lenovo has already reduced the size of useful keys to cram in useless crap
windows keys.  Not even using them as META or HYPER offsets that.  IBM cared
for the keyboard a great deal, the only way it could be better would be if
it used the patented A design, or if it was slightly U-shaped.

Lenovo is starting to break the firmware backwards compatibility right and
left, which has me worried (but it might be a good thing if they make it
less braindead and then *stick* to the new interface for five years or so
without breaking it).  Linux support for the X60 is schizophrenic because of
that, right now.

They have made the firmware/bios changelogs useless.

They are playing the "old model, no fixes" game with the VT issue on a few
thinkpads.

Their promissed Linux support is something we were better off without: they
made a half-hearted attempt at porting their thinkvantage suite to SuSE in
such a bad way it was clearly rigged to fail (nobody is that incompetent),
obviously so that some corporate infighting would end up favorable for
someone in their ranks who doesn't want Linux to get a hold there (no, I am
not even blaming Redmond for this one).  And now they "have a business case"
for not doing it right.

They have removed very relevant high-end functionality from the Windows
thinkvantage suite (a lot of the crypto support being removed is the one I
noticed immediately, but maybe other stuff was removed too).

No, I really don't see a bright future for the thinkpad line under Lenovo's
current strategies.

> I believe that the madwifi drivers do have the rfkill attribute [2], but I am 
> not sure how to confirm this on my system. I tested with rfkill=0 and 
> rfkill=1 which produced the same results of the wireless always being on 
> regardless of the switch state.

Well, Atheros drivers (madwifi/madwifi-ng) are *not* known for their
quality, but since I avoid them like the plague, I don't know if their
rfkill is supposed to be working or not.

> However, according to the thinkwiki entry [1], a T60 also has a switch that 
> does not operate: "On at least one T60, model 2007-62U with Atheros AR5212, 
> running Ubuntu Edgy with the MadWifi driver, the wireless switch has no 
> effect. Wireless operates with the switch in either position. But there's an 
> experimental patch which adds support of the switch to ibm-acpi."

That would mean the radio hardware has no hardware rf-kill support at all.
Yuck.

Nothing will help you if the atheros drivers don't implement rfkill. Nothing
in the thinkpad firmware will kick a PCI/PCIe card off the bus, so if it is
missing the hardware rf kill line, the firmware *cannot* control the radio
state.

thinkpad-acpi will, eventually, map that switch to KEY_WLAN and
KEY_BLUETOOTH, so, *if* madwifi rfkill works, you will be able to get the
switch to work in software.

> Also, I cannot believe that I never noticed this, but the wireless light is 
> always off, even if the wireless card is turned on and in use. I take it that 
> this is a driver (madwifi) issue then?

Yes.  The intel driver switches that led on/off on software, as well...
(there is a gpio output in the intel card to mess with the led. I suppose
atheros does the same).

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh