Re: [RFD] Automatic suspend

Jesse Barnes
2009-02-18T18:01:35Z

On Wednesday, February 18, 2009 9:52 am Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 09:48:04AM -0800, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> > I think "powernag" would be a better name, and it would probably work
> > pretty well. Users would be notified that certain apps should probably
> > be shut down while they're on battery, and nag the authors to fix it.
>
> How do you usefully tell the difference between an application that's
> waking up a lot because it's dumb and an application that's waking up a
> lot because it's doing something useful? One downside of powertop is
> that it's resulted in a lot of "How do I reduce the number of wakeups
> caused by i8042 whenever I use the mouse"-type questions. We don't want
> innocent app writers to be hit by this kind of thing.

Well Ben did mention that it would be hard to figure out a good set of
heuristics, but a userspace app could be pretty flexible, allowing the user
to whitelist apps they know are fine, average the data over a period of time,
etc. Challenging, sure, but it should be possible to come up with something
that's useful in many cases.

--
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center