Re: [RFD] Automatic suspend

Alan Stern
2009-02-19T22:08:20Z

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.

Alan Stern