When the ideapad-laptop driver was first written it was written for laptops
which had a hardware rfkill switch. So when the first ideapad laptops
showed up without a hw rfkill switch and it turned out that in this case
the ideapad firmware interface would always report the wifi being hardware-
blocked, a DMI id list of models which lack a hw rfkill switch was started
(by yours truly). Things were done this way to avoid regressing existing
models with a hw rfkill switch. In hindsight this was a mistake.
Lenovo releases a lot of ideapad models every year and even the latest
models still use the "VPC2004" ACPI interface the ideapad-laptop driver
binds to. Having a hw rfkill switch is quite rare on modern hardware, so
all these new models need to be added to the no_hw_rfkill_list, leading
to a never ending game of whack a mole.
Worse the failure mode when not present on the list, is very bad. In this
case the ideapad-laptop driver will report the wifi as being hw-blocked,
at which points NetworkManager does not even try to use it and the user
ends up with non working wifi.
This leads to various Linux fora on the internet being filled with
wifi not working on ideapad laptops stories, which does not make Linux
look good.
The failure mode when we flip the default to assuming that a hw rfkill
switch is not present OTOH is quite benign. When we properly report the
wifi as being hw-blocked on ideapads which do have the hw-switch; and it
is in the wifi-off position, then at least when using NetworkManager +
GNOME3 the user will get a "wifi disabled in hardware" message when trying
to connect to the wifi from the UI. If OTOH we assume there is no hardware
rfkill switch, then the user will get an empty list for the list of
available networks. Although the empty list vs the "wifi disabled in
hardware" message is a regression, it is a very minor regression and it
can easily be fixed on a model by model basis by filling the new
hw_rfkill_list this commit introduces.
Therefor this commit removes the ever growing no_hw_rfkill_list, flipping
the default to assuming there is no hw rfkill switch and adding a new
hw_rfkill_list. Thereby fixing the wifi not working on all the current
ideapad and yoga models which are not on the list yet and also fixing it
for all future ideapad and yoga models using the "VPC2004" ACPI interface.
Note once this patch has been accepted upstream. I plan to write a blog
post asking for users of ideapads and yoga's with a hw rfkill switch to
step forward, so that we can populate the new hw_rfkill_list with the few
older yoga and ideapad models which actually have a hw rfkill switch.
BugLink: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1703338
Signed-off-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com>
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