wireless.sh cannot use 'device/power/state' to power-off wireless card anymore

[Johannes Hessellund]

I'm having troubles turning off the wireless adapter.
I have a Thinkpad T42 with ipw2100 wifi.
Normally pressing Fn-F5 toggles wireless on/off, but it doesn't work.

Tried doing this in terminal.

~$ sudo /etc/acpi/wireless.sh
/etc/acpi/wireless.sh: line 9: echo: write error: Invalid argument
0

Which is this line:

echo -n 2 > /sys/class/net/eth1/device/power/state;

Why is this not writeable, not even as root ?
This was never a problem until now.

[Alfredo Matos (alfmatos)]

I can confirm this behavior on a ipw3945 also. But it seems that it's more a sysfs problem of the driver rather then permissions...

[Alfredo Matos (alfmatos)]

Can you post kernel version and ipw2100 driver version please ?

To get the kernel version: uname -r
For ipw2100 try: cat /var/log/message | grep 2100 | grep driver
this should yield some information

[Alfredo Matos (alfmatos)]

Filled Upstream:

http://bughost.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1238

Feel free to comment on the upstream also, adding valuable information.

Thanks.

[Johannes Hessellund (osos)]

~$ uname -r
2.6.20-9-generic

~$ cat /var/log/messages | grep 2100 | grep Driver
Mar 12 07:23:13 kernel: [ 16.100000] ipw2100: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Driver, git-1.2.2

Hope this gives some information.

[Olivier (olivier-lacroix)]

Same problem here with ipw2200.

[Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3)]

The problem is that the kernel does no more support writing to that file. It has been disabled because it was dangerous. Ubuntu WILL NEED a new way to disable wireless

[Johannes Hessellund (osos)]

How does other wireless adapters control their powerstate ?

Anyone looking into this ?
On a laptop this is an importent feature. I save ~2W by turning of wireless, which saves lots of battery.

[Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3)]

I'm not aware of this, sorry...

[Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3)]

also affecting ipw2200 and every other wireless cards

[Nicolò Chieffo (yelo3)]

I've searched a lot and maybe I found that in the future wireless drivers will "have to" disable the card when the interface is down:

ifconfig eth1 down
will deactivate the wireless card.
In some ipw2100 mailing list (don't have the link) this is discussed but it is not yet implemented