Re: Attempted summary of suspend-blockers LKML thread

Rafael J. Wysocki
2010-08-05T00:20:51Z

On Thursday, August 05, 2010, Arve Hjønnevåg wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 10:51:07PM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> >> On Wednesday, August 04, 2010, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >> > No! And that's precisely the issue. Android's existing behaviour could
> >> > be entirely implemented in the form of binary that manually triggers
> >> > suspend when (a) the screen is off and (b) no userspace applications
> >> > have indicated that the system shouldn't sleep, except for the wakeup
> >> > event race. Imagine the following:
> >> >
> >> > 1) The policy timeout is about to expire. No applications are holding
> >> > wakelocks. The system will suspend providing nothing takes a wakelock.
> >> > 2) A network packet arrives indicating an incoming SIP call
> >> > 3) The VOIP application takes a wakelock and prevents the phone from
> >> > suspending while the call is in progress
> >> >
> >> > What stops the system going to sleep between (2) and (3)? cgroups don't,
> >> > because the voip app is an otherwise untrusted application that you've
> >> > just told the scheduler to ignore.
> >>
> >> I _think_ you can use the just-merged /sys/power/wakeup_count mechanism to
> >> avoid the race (if pm_wakeup_event() is called at 2)).
> >
> > Yes, I think that solves the problem. The only question then is whether
>
> How? By passing a timeout to pm_wakeup_event when the network driver
> gets the packet or by passing 0. If you pass a timeout it is the same
> as using a wakelock with a timeout and should work (assuming the
> timeout you picked is long enough). If you don't pass a timeout it
> does not work, since the packet may not be visible to user-space yet.

Alternatively, pm_stay_awake() / pm_relax() can be used.

> > it's preferable to use cgroups or suspend fully, which is pretty much up
> > to the implementation. In other words, is there a reason we're still
>
> I have seen no proposed way to use cgroups that will work. If you
> leave some processes running while other processes are frozen you run
> into problems when a frozen process holds a resource that a running
> process needs.
>
>
> > having this conversation? :) It'd be good to have some feedback from
> > Google as to whether this satisfies their functional requirements.
> >
>
> That is "this"? The merged code? If so, no it does not satisfy our
> requirements. The in kernel api, while offering similar functionality
> to the wakelock interface, does not use any handles which makes it
> impossible to get reasonable stats (You don't know which pm_stay_awake
> request pm_relax is reverting).

Why is that a problem (out of curiosity)?

> The proposed in user-space interface
> of calling into every process that receives wakeup events before every
> suspend call

Well, you don't really need to do that.

> is also not compatible with existing apps.

Thanks,
Rafael