Is rfkill new?

[Ian Malone]

On 8 January 2016 at 18:36, Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've just been getting switched over to fedora 23 from 22, and
> spent a long time figuring out why the heck my wifi dongle
> as access point didn't work any longer.
>
> I finally found log messages about the interface being soft
> blocked by rfkill, which then led me down another rabbit hole
> to figure out what the heck rfkill and soft blocking was about.
>
> Is rfkill completely new in fedora 23, or has it been around
> for a while, but the default recently changed to blocked rather
> than unblocked?
>
> (I do have things working now by adding unblock code to my
> script that starts the access point).

rfkill is just a tool that manipulates the state of the driver for
various radio-type devices (bluetooth, wifi, I think wan) and reports
on power (obviously it can't toggle hardware kill), it doesn't have
it's own default. Not sure why your dongle is defaulting to off, could
be a change in the driver somehow, or whatever tool you use to manage
the connection.

(For a while in Fedora 1x series I had to use rfkill to toggle the
software block on my old iwl3945 card as the driver would get into a
state where it thought hardware kill was on. Eventually even that
stopped working, not sure if there was some problem with the driver,
but towards the end it stopped working in Windows too, so there may
have been some hardware problem involved.)

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk