Concerning wireless light on my laptop

Rick Stevens rstevens at internap.com
Mon Nov 12 23:04:02 UTC 2007


On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 23:43 +0100, Christoph Höger wrote:
> Aaron Konstam schrieb:
> > On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 19:08 +0100, Christoph Höger wrote:
> >> Tim schrieb:
> >>> Tim:
> >>>>> But mine doesn't actually use them for activity status.  They don't
> >>>>> change when using wireless (i.e. there's no blinking during reception
> >>>>> not transmission), and they don't change for network availability (it's
> >>>>> lit if you've enabled your wireless hardware, whether or not their is
> >>>>> another wireless device to connect to).
> >>> Christoph Höger:
> >>>> what hardware (and what driver) do you use? I saw this with iwl3945.
> >>>> That is not very surprising as iwl3945 is still beta software.
> >>> [tim at suspishus ~]$ /sbin/lspci | grep ireless
> >>> 03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
> >>>
> >>> It uses whatever driver it finds automatically, as came with the
> >>> original installation.  I've not added anything, it worked out of the
> >>> box, so to speak.
> >>>
> >>> At least the networking works, even if the LED doesn't work
> >>> properly.  ;-)
> >>>
> >> Well, then you have to wait for the intel developers to integrate the 
> >> led into their driver. I doubt that this is a very high priority target ;)
> >>
> > But it is funny that they incorporated it in to the Windows driver, but
> > maybe that is because there are more Windows machines.
> 
> The difference is: iwl3945 is pretty new (mac80211 related stuff) and 
> AFAIK not even in the official kernel. So it't absolutely normal that 
> those low priority features are the last ones that get finished.
> (What would you say if you'd had that LED but 90% package loss)

If you look at the readmes with the code, you'll see that the developers
specifically don't "flash the light" as the CPU cycles needed to do that
were better spent (at least in this iteration of the code) doing real
work.  If you build the stuff from the source tarballs, there is a
config option ("./configure --with-leds" or something like that) that
will build it with led-flashing enabled.  I'd have to dig into it.

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- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
-                                                                    -
-  What's small, yellow and very, VERY dangerous?  The root canary!  -
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