*** Bug 362299 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 443346 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Makes sense.

Note that with iwlagn 1.3.27ks (in this case for a 4965AGN Mini-PCI-E card) on 2.6.28-11-generic (ubuntu kernel), enabling power managment using:

  iwconfig wlan0 power on

or with:

  echo 5 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwlagn/*/power_level

works fine, and doesn't disrupt existing connections, prevent establishment of new connections, nor severely impact network performance. It does slow discovery of new networks a bit, but that's to be expected.

Really, though, managing the interface's power management isn't NM's job. It's gnome-power-manager's. If the driver doesn't power manage correctly, such that NM can't cope with power management being enabled, it shouldn't permit PM to be enabled at all.

However, there *IS* one area where NM should be involved. If NM is in the process of establishing a connection to a network (it's doing DHCP etc), it should disable power management on the interface for the duration. That will DRAMATICALLY reduce how long it takes to establish a connection in my experience.

NM should also disable interface power management when the machine has just resumed from suspend-to-ram or suspend-to-disk, so it can quickly find local networks and join one if a suitable one is found. After (say) a minute, or when a network is joined, power management should be restored to normal.

So, since NM should be fiddling with the card's power management some of the time, and it kind of "owns" the card anyway, perhaps NM should be responsible for its power management. Here's what I'm thinking:

- gnome-power-manager maintains network card power policies:
  - On AC, optimize wifi for {best performance|lowest power use}
  - On battery, optimize wifi for {best performance|lowest power use}
- NM uses dbus events from gnome-power-manager/hal/whatever to find out about AC power loss/gain and switch power settings appropriately.
- NM also watches for and acts on resume notification dbus events
- Because NM controls the card's power level and nobody else is messing with it, it's free to turn up the power when establishing connections and perform other related tricks.

So, reassign this to gnome-power-manager...

Is there a HAL (or devicekit) interface to manage power saving in wireless? I don't think that gnome-power-manager will do anything if there's any...

(In reply to comment #5)
> So, reassign this to gnome-power-manager...
> 
> Is there a HAL (or devicekit) interface to manage power saving in wireless? I
> don't think that gnome-power-manager will do anything if there's any...

Best way is probably for NM to manage it based on listening to upower.  NM already listens to upower for suspend/resume events so we might as well do it for stuff like AC/battery and such.  As Craig suggests, there are times we want to disable power-saving to ensure critical operations are successful.

*** Bug 577816 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

So what we should do here is create a new preference for each WiFi connection for power saving behavior.  This should be on a per-connection basis since some networks have problems with power-saving due to buggy APs and thus PS could be disabled on a per-network basis.  There would be three different values:

Disabled (full power)
Low-Power (PS unconditionally enabled)
Automatic (default)

Automatic would listen to any power-manager (like upower or whatever) and use full-power/best-performance when on AC power or if a battery was not present.  If on battery power it would drop back to a reasonable default value for power saving.  If the interface was disconnected NM would always enable powersaving mode, which shouldn't be an issue since the card isn't talking to an AP while disconnected.

energy saving suggestion wifi, could insert some warning in the nm-applet to verify visual mode when the wifi is with active energy mode.

It happens that some wifi cards, have a saving system anergy that if you are running your laptop battery, this system is activated and the network connection is intermittent, not to confuse the user and to imply that you have problems with the connection network is a good idea to have a visual way to see if this energy saving is active or not.

you can highlight the wifi when activated that option icon.

Power Management: off regular wifi icon
Power Management: wifi on an icon that differs than normal

to enable or disable this power saving option of wifi card
can be integrated with energy saving settings of the system but if you can not you can add an option in the menu of nm-applet

Wireless power save, for example. ;)

I wish I knew programming but I can only provide ideas, thank you.

powersaving is now supported as explained in comment 8.

Only thing missing is an "automatic" mode.

bugzilla.gnome.org is being shut down in favor of a GitLab instance. 
We are closing all old bug reports and feature requests in GNOME Bugzilla which have not seen updates for a long time.

If you still use NetworkManager and if you still see this bug / want this feature in a recent and supported version of NetworkManager, then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/-/issues/

Thank you for creating this report and we are sorry it could not be implemented (workforce and time is unfortunately limited).