ieee80211softmac kernel module, I guess, is filling the system log of these messages:

SoftMAC: Scanning 14 channels
SoftMAC: Scanning finished
SoftMAC: Start scanning with channel: 1
SoftMAC: Scanning 14 channels
SoftMAC: Scanning finished
SoftMAC: Start scanning with channel: 1
SoftMAC: Scanning 14 channels
SoftMAC: Scanning finished
SoftMAC: Start scanning with channel: 1
SoftMAC: Scanning 14 channels
SoftMAC: Scanning finished


How to stop it? Is there some kernel module options to be given which would suppress these scanning messages?

The reason it will be scanning, is NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher (FC6) which will automaticly switch to a wireless network if wired (100baseT) one is not available. Yes, it is a laptop which mainly is connected to the wire but sometimes will be detached and moving, so disabling NetworkManager is not a good option.

# lsmod|grep -i mac
ieee80211softmac 42689 1 bcm43xx
ieee80211 42761 2 bcm43xx,ieee80211softmac

Those messages can only be “stopped” when configuring your kernel. When doing so, leave out CONFIG_IEEE80211_SOFTMAC_DEBUG.

Ahh...so putting something like "options ieee80211softmac debug=0" or similar to /etc/modprobe.conf won't fix it?

I guess NetworkManager will scan every 3 minutes, so SoftMAC will write to system log every 3 minutes. Currently when the machine has been up several days, there is not much else but these SoctMAC's lines in the /var/log/messages

Thanks for the reply though. I guess with little effort just the ieee80211softmac.ko can be recompiled and nothing else need to be.

Unfortunately, the ieee80211softmac module takes no module parameters.