Ubuntu offers no control over WLAN power-management

[schmolch]

To enable wlan power-management i have to do echo 7 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/0000:03:00.0/power_level
and it took me a long time to figure this out because it was different with the driver previous to iwl3945 where it was done with iwpriv.

It is not even documented anywhere on the Ubuntu Wiki how to do that.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

not a NM bug. drivers are still not perfect, but those that are good should be properly supported.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

not gpm bug either.

[schmolch (saschaheid)]

Why is it not a gpm bug?

There is no other gui (for gnome) to access power-management related functions other than gpm, it should be implemented there.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

in theory disable wireless in NM is supposed to power off the radio. not sure what (and where?) gpm has to do on top.

[schmolch (saschaheid)]

Im not talking about turning the card on or off but about the powersaving modes the wlan-drivers offer.

Ubuntu offers no control over this other than entering a cryptic command on the console that is not even documented anywhere.

The iwl3945 driver for example can be set to 7 different modes with different timeouts and according to powertop the difference between AC-mode and battery-mode is about 1W.

I can not even put this command into rc.conf since the wlan-card is not up at that point of the boot-process.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

i think that would deserve a real spec ... at best to be discussed during UDS in december. I would suggest that you draft such a blueprint and register it for discussion there.