'Signal' interface

[Aleksander Morgado]

Hey,

So I've been thinking in having a new DBus interface for modems which
support extended signal information reporting. I currently wrote the
support for a new 'Signal' interface, which exposes things like RSSI,
EcIo, RSRP, RSRQ... currently only available for QMI-based modems.

I would like to know what you think of the the new interface. My current
questions would be:

 * Is 'Signal' a good name for the interface? I was thinking in adding
more stuff there, like instant power values of the RX/TX chains. Can't
think of a more generic name, suggestions welcome.

 * Currently values are provided as independent properties, e.g.
"gsm_rssi", "umts_rssi"... Another option would have been to provide
per-technology dictionaries, like a "gsm" property with signature
"a{sd}" where the string is the parameter (e.g. "rssi") and the double
is the actual value. Don't have a strong feeling about this.

 * By default, retrieving extended signal information is disabled
(rate=0); the user needs to explicitly enable it by providing a rate>0
in Setup().

The current implementation is available in the
'aleksander/signal-interface' branch upstream, and also has new mmcli
commands to test it:

Setup extended signal information retrieval to be refreshed every 5s:
 $> sudo mmcli -m 0 --signal-setup=5

Then, get all values:
 $> sudo mmcli -m 0 --signal-get

Also, the retrieval will be done *only* when the modem is enabled.

You can also take a look at the interface itself directly here:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ModemManager/ModemManager/tree/introspection/org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.Modem.Signal.xml?h=aleksander/signal-interface

Comments welcome!

-- 
Aleksander