Re: When will the lunacy end? (Was Re: [PATCH] uswsusp: add pmops->{prepare,enter,finish} support (aka "platform mode"))

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 07:38:31AM +1000, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> On Tue, 2006-09-26 at 22:35 +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 26 September 2006 22:14, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > > On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 12:45:00AM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > > >...
> > > > solid)
> > > > 	apart from HIGHMEM64G fiasco, and related agpgart fiasco long
> > > > 	time before that... these are driver problems...
> > > >...
> > > 
> > > One point that seems to be a bit forgotten is that driver problems do 
> > > actually matter a lot:
> > > 
> > > I for one do not care much whether I can abort suspending (I can always 
> > > resume) or whether dancing penguins are displayed during suspending - 
> > > but the fact that my saa7134 card only outputs the picture but no sound 
> > > after resuming from suspend-to-disk is a real show-stopper for me.
> 
> Agreed that some things are more important than others. But to some
> people, user interface does matter. After all, we want (well I want)
> people considering converting from Windows to see that free software can
> be better than proprietary stuff, not just imitate what they're doing. 
> 
> Suspend2 doesn't actually provide dancing penguins while suspending -
> it's a simple progress bar in either pure text or overlayed on an image
> of your choosing.
> 
> The support for aborting is really just fall out from the work on
> debugging and testing failure paths.
>...

Sorry if this sounded as if I was against improvements of suspend.
That was not my intention.

But as long as there are driver problems, suspend as a whole can not be 
called solid. The core itself might be solid or not, but without working 
drivers this doesn't buy users much.

A user might be impressed by a progress bar on a nifty image, but if one 
or more of his drivers have problems with suspend the user won't get a 
good impression of Linux.

How many driver problems with suspend are buried in emails and
Bugzillas (will problems like kernel Bugzilla #6035 ever be debugged?)?

> Nigel

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed