Bug 1530391
| Summary: | WIFI enabled by default in RHEL 7 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 | Reporter: | mcolombo |
| Component: | NetworkManager | Assignee: | sushil kulkarni <sukulkar> |
| Status: | CLOSED NOTABUG | QA Contact: | Desktop QE <desktop-qa-list> |
| Severity: | low | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | low | ||
| Version: | 7.4 | CC: | atragler, bgalvani, fgiudici, lrintel, mcolombo, rkhan, sukulkar, thaller |
| Target Milestone: | rc | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | x86_64 | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | If docs needed, set a value | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 2018-02-21 17:03:19 UTC | Type: | Bug |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
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Description
mcolombo
2018-01-02 21:16:17 UTC
Devices may appear anytime. For example when plugging in a USB Wi-Fi device. Or when kernel is just slow at discovering the hardware. Or when the kernel module is not loaded at the moment. NetworkManager cannot know whether that will happen (or if/when).
The rfkill flags are hence always present -- even if there is no device.
They allow you to block Wi-Fi from the first moment when the Wi-Fi device shows up. If you don't have a Wi-Fi device (on the customer's server), they do not matter.
NetworkManager also does not disable rfkill by default. Rather, it assumes that the user wants to make use of a Wi-Fi device.
The user can toggle the flag with `nmcli radio wifi off` or `nmcli networking off`. Such a change is also persisted to file (/var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state) so that after reboot the flag is still disabled.
Also, the rfkill flags are composed of an NetworkManager internal decision (software) and a hardware decision (e.g. your notebook as a hardware button do disable the Wi-Fi radio). For rfkill to be cleared, both the software and hardware rfkill flags must be enabled.
> Customer is concerned about WIFI being enabled by default in a `server` OS
> even though wireless devices are not present. Customer states that wifi should
> not be enabled by default on a server especially if a wifi device is not
> present and believes this is a bug.
The concerns are not clear to me. what's the problem really? What problems does it cause?
On a server, the customer probably wants to remove the package NetworkManager-wifi. This will uninstall support for NetworkManager to handle Wi-Fi devices, and save a few bytes. After that, Wi-Fi devices are treated as generic and most Wi-Fi functionality is not accessible via NetworkManager (you could still use wpa_supplicant outside of NetworkManager to setup the Wi-Fi device, and only use NetworkManager to only handle the IP addressing).
But as said, the rfkill flags are always present, regardless of whether NM supports Wi-Fi devices actively (meaning the NetworkManager-wifi package).
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