ath driver and turning wireless off.

[Tim Kientzle]

Sam Leffler wrote:
> On Wednesday 31 December 2003 04:57 pm, Sam Leffler wrote:
>>On Wednesday 31 December 2003 01:08 pm, David Gilbert wrote:
>>
>>>BTW... this Dell (D800) has the ability to turn the wireless hardware
>>>off.  ... Is the ath driver able to handle this with any degree of
>>>gracefullness?
>>
>>If you mark the interface down the radio should be turned off.
> 
> Actually, now that I think some more, these cards vary as to whether the 
> rfkill switch is handled in software or hardware.  If the card needs software 
> support to turn off the radio then it's not there but will be soon.

Is anyone working on "auto-dial" support?  That is, where
the radio shuts off automatically after a certain interval
of inactivity and gets powered up automatically (including
running dhclient, etc, to reconfigure the connection) when
there's outgoing traffic.  That would be very nice, indeed.

I've been cursing the lack of this capability in a Dell
Pocket PC handheld recently.  Leaving the radio
powered on really wrecks the battery life, and it is quite
painful to be constantly turning off the radio manually.

Tim