Re: [linux-pm] [PATCH 1/8] PM: Opportunistic suspend support.

Rafael J. Wysocki
2010-05-30T19:50:58Z

On Sunday 30 May 2010, Neil Brown wrote:
> On Fri, 28 May 2010 21:04:53 -0700
> Arve Hjønnevåg <arve@android.com> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 7:52 PM, mark gross <640e9920@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 05:23:54PM +1000, Neil Brown wrote:
> > >> On Wed, 26 May 2010 14:20:51 +0100
> > >> Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> > On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 02:57:45PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > >> >
> > >> > > I fail to see why. In both cases the woken userspace will contact a
> > >> > > central governing task, either the kernel or the userspace suspend
> > >> > > manager, and inform it there is work to be done, and please don't
> > >> > > suspend now.
> > >> >
> > >> > Thinking about this, you're right - we don't have to wait, but that does
> > >> > result in another problem. Imagine we get two wakeup events
> > >> > approximately simultaneously. In the kernel-level universe the kernel
> > >> > knows when both have been handled. In the user-level universe, we may
> > >> > have one task schedule, bump the count, handle the event, drop the count
> > >> > and then we attempt a suspend again because the second event handler
> > >> > hasn't had an opportunity to run yet. We'll then attempt a suspend and
> > >> > immediately bounce back up. That's kind of wasteful, although it'd be
> > >> > somewhat mitigated by checking that right at the top of suspend entry
> > >> > and returning -EAGAIN or similar.
> > >> >
> > >>
> > >> (I'm coming a little late to this party, so excuse me if I say something that
> > >> has already been covered however...)
> > >>
> > >> The above triggers a sequence of thoughts which (When they settled down) look
> > >> a bit like this.
> > >>
> > >> At the hardware level, there is a thing that we could call a "suspend
> > >> blocker". It is an interrupt (presumably level-triggered) that causes the
> > >> processor to come out of suspend, or not to go into it.
> > >>
> > >> Maybe it makes sense to export a similar thing from the kernel to user-space.
> > >> When any event happens that would wake the device (and drivers need to know
> > >> about these already), it would present something to user-space to say that
> > >> the event happened.
> > >>
> > >> When user-space processes the event, it clears the event indicator.
> > >
> > > we did I proposed making the suspend enabling a oneshot type of thing
> > > and all sorts of weak arguments came spewing forth. I honestly couldn't
> > > tell if I was reading valid input or fanboy BS.
> > >
> >
> > Can you be more specific? If you are talking about only letting
> > drivers abort suspend, not block it, then the main argument against
> > that is that you are forcing user-space to poll until the driver stops
> > aborting suspend (which according to people arguing against us using
> > suspend would make the power-manager a "bad" process). Or are you
> > talking about blocking the request from user-space until all other
> > suspend-blockers have been released and then doing a single suspend
> > cycle before returning. This would not be as bad, but it would force
> > the user-space power manager to be multi-threaded since it now would
> > have way to cancel the request. Either way, what problem are you
> > trying to solve by making it a one-shot request?
> >
>
> I don't know exactly what Mark has in mind, but I would advocate 1-shot
> simply because what we currently have (echo mem > /sys/power/state) is
> 1-shot and I don't believe you need to do more than fix the bugs in that.
>
> Your question of whether to abort or block suspend in central I think - the
> answer to that question will make or break a possible solution.
>
> Simply aborting the suspend cannot work as you rightly say - the suspend
> daemon would then spin until other user-space processes get into action.
> Simply blocking while there are any unhandled 'wakeup events' - then aborting
> if there were any - is how I think it should work. However as it
> doesn't work that way now I don't think it is safe to make it work that way
> unconditionally. If we did we could find that existing configurations always
> block suspend indefinitely with would clearly be a regression.
>
> I think we still need some sort of "suspend_prepare". This would have two
> particular effects.
> 1/ it sets the start time for interpreting the word "were" above. i.e. the
> suspend would abort of there were any unhandled wakeup events since the
> "suspend_prepare" was issued.
> 2/ It would allow unhandled wakeup events to abort the suspend. If no
> suspend_prepare had been issued, then only "new" wakeup events would
> be allowed to abort the suspend (i.e. the old racy version of suspend).
>
> So the suspend daemon does:
>
> wait for there to be no user-space suspend blocks
> issue suspend_prepare
> check there are still no suspend blocks
> if there are, loop (possibly issue suspend_abort if needed)
> issue suspend request
> loop
>
> processes that handle wakeup events would
>
> poll for event to be available
> request suspend-block
> consume event
> release suspend-block
> loop
>
> (where consuming the event would quite possibly cause some other
> suspend-block to become active - e.g. it might request that the display
> be unlocked which would block suspends for a time).

Well, please have a look at the Alan Stern's proposal here:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/5/29/77

Rafael