Subject: Re: power management and related concerns
To: Jan Danielsson <jan.danielsson@gmail.com>
From: Garrett D'Amore <garrett_damore@tadpole.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 07/01/2006 08:23:57
Jan Danielsson wrote:
> Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>   
>> Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>>     
>>> On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 17:28:15 -0700, "Garrett D'Amore"
>>> <garrett_damore@tadpole.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
>>
>> I would strongly, strongly prefer to avoid naming things "acpi" or
>> "apm".  A lot of real systems don't use anything like these, and it
>> would be nice not to have to pretend your SPARC workstation was a PeeCee
>> to deal with power related events. :-)
>>     
>
> energyd
> savetreesd (some will think this is a spam daemon)
> algored (a very dull daemon, but it is trying to save our environment)
> kyotod
>
>    Silly comments aside.. Will it be possible for the daemon to signal
> back and say "Ok, sleeping is fine, just not *right now*. Call me back
> soon.".
>
>    I may want NetBSD to go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity,
> unless I'm burning a DVD; then I do not want it to go to sleep until
> that process is done.
>
>   

Yes, that should be possible.  Userland should be queried before any
suspend.  However, in the example you give, frankly the kernel driver
for the DVD should be responsible for saying "not right now".

Right now of course, we don't have any uniform way to management
suspend, AFAIK powerd doesn't do anything there.  I guess there is some
progress with ACPI, but I've not looked at it much yet.

-- 
Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer
Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division,
General Dynamics C4 Systems
http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/
Phone: 951 325-2134  Fax: 951 325-2191