On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 17:28:15 -0700, "Garrett D'Amore"
<garrett_damore@tadpole.com> wrote:

> Well, I've made the mistake of looking at what we currently have in
> NetBSD.  And comparing it with some real (our) hardware.
> 
> There are few quick points for discussion:
> 
> 1) there doesn't seem a clear way to indicate powerfail for a low
> battery condition in sysmon.  Should I just be sending init some signal?
> 
> 2) No way to indicate overtemp status either
> 
> 3) Currently it isn't clear whether you should be registering with APM,
> sysmon, or something else for things like battery status, etc.  It would
> be really, really good if drivers didn't have to do _both_ of these
> things.  Can we maybe have a sysmon APM compatibility layer?  (I guess
> there are some userland apps that "know" about APM.  Bletch.)
> 
> 4) We need some userland tools to talk to sysmon in base, I think. 
> (E.g. to query batteries, etc.)
> 
> 5) In many respects, sysmon looks like a good start.  I've coded a quick
> power management driver for the Ultrabook IIi (okay, it was mostly a
> port from Solaris), and it basically works for things like lid switch,
> AC power cord un/plug, and power button.
> 
I've been thinking similar thoughts.  I have a paper design for (what I
had tentatively called) envstatd.  The config file would look something
like this:

	acpibat0         <.04      /bin/shutdown -p now
	temp=acpitemp	 >70*2	   /bin/shutdown -p now

where the *2 indicates that it has to happen twice in a row.  A few more
frills, like shell variables for each config line -- the 'temp' means that
a script would be run with envstatd_temp set to the value.  A | at the
start of the command would create a pipeline that would be fed the value
on stdin, to permit easy real-time graphing programs.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb