dellWirelessCtl

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 22:01 -0700, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> 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.

Unfortunately, NM has to poll because there's no way to get events for
when the wireless killswitch is turned on or off before the 2.6.27
kernel.  People want the killswitch to magically just work, but the
infrastructure just wasn't there to make that happen, thus NM has to
poll every so often, or else state changes to your wireless killswitch
won't be noticed at all.

Seriously though, I've never heard of this jerkiness happening on Dell
laptops before.  Tons of people have been using the killswitch stuff for
at least a year without complaints like this so far.  I tend to think
there's still something wrong with the kernel or dellWirelessCtl given
that.

Dan