eeePC 900 && turning off wireless (ath0)

[Matthias Apitz]

El día Friday, June 27, 2008 a las 12:16:03AM +0100, Rui Paulo escribió:

> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 09:55:45AM +0200, Matthias Apitz wrote:
> > 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Yesterday I did some tests with my eeePC 900 to see how long it would
> > work with the 4400 mAh battery ... it seems that turning of the wireless
> > card (ath0), which can be turned of from the BIOS, has big effect and
> > let work the eeePC for more then 2hours 15minutes;
> > 
> > in the Xandros Linux you can turn off the NIC as well with Fn+F2 which
> > in FreeBSD does not work at boot stage, i.e. when you may defer the
> > booting in the boot loader countdown;
> 
> Yes, this only works after booting. At least on the 701.
> 
> > is there any way to switch this off without going into the BIOS?
> 
> After booting you can unload ath module and press Fn+F2. It should turn
> off wireless. 
> 
> The problem is that you can't turn it back on. For that, we need PCIe
> hotplug support. (That's what Fn+F2 does, it ejects the wireless card).

Hello Rui,

I recompiled the kernel to have if_ath out of the kernel, but as a
loaded module at boot:

$ kldstat
Id Refs Address    Size     Name
 1   14 0xc0400000 8c7098   kernel
 2    1 0xc0cc8000 1242c    if_ath.ko
 3    3 0xc0cdb000 46324    ath_hal.ko
 4    2 0xc0d22000 4218     ath_rate.ko
 5    1 0xc0d27000 14324    snd_hda.ko
 6    2 0xc0d3c000 4a5ac    sound.ko
 7    1 0xc0d87000 6a32c    acpi.ko
 8    1 0xc4394000 22000    linux.ko

I can unload if_ath, ath_hal and ath_rate which drops the interface
ath0, but even in this case Fn+F2 has no affect at all; any idea?

I've had a look into the Xandros Linux and they do it with ACPI events,
dropping the modules and others; I could provide their script
/etc/acpi/wlan.sh if someone wants to have a look into;

Thx

	matthias
-- 
Matthias Apitz
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