dellWirelessCtl

[Danny Kukawka]

On Montag, 22. September 2008, Marc Ferland wrote:
> I'm currently running the Sabayon Linux distro (64bit, kernel 2.6.26) on
> a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. The problem I'm having is with the
> dellWirelessCtl program. Each time it is run, it uses a lot of CPU and
> the machine becomes "jerky".
>
> I asked Micheal E. Brown from Dell about the issue and here's what he
>
> had to say:
> > This, unfortunately, is normal. The dellWirelessCtl program uses an SMI
> > interrupt to ask BIOS about the status, which causes BIOS to take over
> > from the OS to do its thing before it returns. You can probably set HAL
> > to run it less often.
> > --
> > Michael
>
> So my question is: How can I tell the HAL daemon to stop running this
> task every 6-7 sec. Is there a way to disable it?

I've never seen such problems, but this may differ from machine to machine. 

It's not hal which cause the trouble, it's NetworkManager which permanently 
polls the HAL interface to get the current state of the killswitch. Maybe 
someone should fix NM (maybe it's already fixed with the latest kernel 
version and NM), not sure.

Danny