Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> oliver gould wrote:
>> On 2006-08-13 13:07 -0500, Mark Kirby wrote:
>>  
>>   
>>> iwi(4) uses firmload(9) to load firmware images. You no longer need to
>>> use iwictl(8) to load the firmware. [Nick Hudson]
>>>     
>> This is a welcome change.  Well, mostly..  Is there any way to _un_load
>> the firmware?  Being unable to turn the radio off is pretty wasteful of
>> battery power, and therefore pretty annoying for me.
>>
>> That is, unless I'm totally off-base here.  I assume that
>>   $ iwictl iwi0 -r
>>   Radio is ON
>> means that the wireless card is using power.
>>
>>   
> 
> In the grand scheme of things, wireless card power consumption (for most
> devices at least) is pretty minimal.  For non-MIMO devices, figure that
> _transmit_ power is ~100-200mW.  I'd be surprised if it made much
> difference in the grand scheme of things on a typical laptop.  On many
> laptops, the single biggest power consumer is the backlight.  On high
> performance units it is often the CPU or the GPU.  The WLAN chipset is
> usually barely noticeable.
> 
> (For example, a WLAN chipset might use ~.5W, but your processor probably
> uses ~20W unless you have a particularly low power unit.)
> 
> All the numbers above are swags, but the qualitative analysis is based
> on actual experience with Sun Ray thin-client technologies.  Even with
> those extremely low power units, it was not considered worth the
> engineering effort to do the power saving stuff for WLAN, mostly because
> the consumption was so small (the power draw from the backlight dwarfed
> the 802.11 chipset).

Besides all that, the radio in iwi is not controlled by the firmware, 
but instead by your laptop's button.