How is wireless signal strength for NetworkManager calculated

[Rejy M Cyriac]

On 01/20/2014 10:28 AM, Ranjan Maitra wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering how wireless signal strength (as displayed by the
> network-manager applet) is calculated. There is a percentage reported:
> what does this percent mean and where does NetworkManager get its
> values from?
> 
> While I am  here, I also wanted to know the answer to the question as
> to how the interfaces are decided in latter-day Fedoras: to elucidate,
> it used to be that eth0 and wlan0 and ppp0 were the interfaces. Now it
> seems to depend (and vary from one machine to the other). How do these
> get decided nowadays? Is there a generic way to get to the correct
> interface to use in programming? I am thinking of conky which requires
> the interface (from ifconfig, say) to set up signal strength, etc.
> 
That would be biosdevname. It has been around for some time now.

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Release_Notes/sect-Release_Notes-Changes_for_Desktop_Users.html#sect-RelNotes-Networking

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Release_Notes/sect-Release_Notes-Changes_for_Desktop.html#idm28009696

More info:

https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/biosdevname

http://linux.dell.com/files/biosdevname/

http://linux.dell.com/files/whitepapers/consistent_network_device_naming_in_linux.pdf

- rejy (rmc)