Re: [RFD] Automatic suspend

Rafael J. Wysocki
2009-02-19T22:21:46Z

On Thursday 19 February 2009, Alan Stern wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
>
> > > > Again, the decision to trigger automatic suspend has to be based on some
> > > > well defined criteria and the (in)activity of devices seems to be one of them.
> > >
> > > I don't know what criteria the system monitor would use.
> >
> > I don't know either and this is the whole point. They need to be specified
> > somehow and I'm not sure if "we suspend if no one is holding a wakelock" is the
> > right approach.
>
> That isn't really a criterion; it's just a mechanism. All it does is
> push the problem back one level. Now the question becomes: When is it
> appropriate/necessary to hold a wakelock?
>
> > > It might have to be platform-specific. The Android people seem to have a
> > > pretty good idea of what criteria will work for them.
> >
> > I'd really like to know in what situations Androind is supposed to suspend
> > automatically.
>
> It might be better to ask in what situations Android is _not_ supposed
> to sleep automatically. In other words, in what situations is a
> wakelock acquired? Since the whole system is only a phone, this
> question should have a reasonably well-defined answer.
>
> > > Inactivity of devices isn't always a good criterion. There might be a
> > > background task which wakes up every few seconds to do something as
> > > long as the system is awake, thereby keeping some device always active.
> > > The activity from this background task shouldn't prevent an auto-sleep.
> >
> > In fact there are two problems here. First, there may be a task preventing
> > some devices from becoming inactive (like syslog).
>
> Which means that device inactivity isn't always a good indicator for
> auto-sleep. (But then there can be different levels of activity: A
> disk should always block auto-sleep while it is carrying out I/O, but
> it might not block auto-sleep just because it is spinning.)
>
> > Second, there may be
> > a task waiting for something important to happen, such that automatic suspend
> > cannot be triggered while it's waiting. In both cases, IMO, the kernel is not
> > in a point to decide whether to suspend or not, because the user space knows
> > better.
>
> That's the whole point behind userspace wakelocks! They provide a
> mechanism for userspace to tell the kernel when (as far as userspace is
> concerned) it is or is not okay to auto-sleep.

Still, one can go further and observe that the user space can in fact start
automatic suspend by itself whenever it knows it's appropriate ...

Thanks,
Rafael