Re: NAK new drivers without proper power management?

[Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 10:18:42AM +1100, Nigel Cunningham wrote:
[snip]
> > Hmm sorry, but we don't have the same usages of notebooks. For no reason
> > would I keep documents open, for two reasons :
> > 
> >   - when I shutdown my notebook, it is to move from one customer to
> >     home/company/another customer. There's no related work anyway, the
> >     network will have changed and I'll have to switch nearly all of my
> >     apps anyway. So using suspend just to save one reboot is not worth
> >     it (for me) IMHO.
> 
> The network configuration utilities can help there. In addition,
> Suspend2 preserves the commandline you used to boot with
> (/sys/power/suspend2/resume_commandline), so you can use a combination
> of slightly varying grub entries (I have one for not starting ath0 and
> one for starting it) and scripts to do different things in different
> environments. The resume_commandline is writable, so can be cleared
> after usage if there were anything sensitive there.

OK, I see there are features to make life easier when I decide to use
suspend. But it looks like that using suspend is the goal and dealing
with the constraints is a lot of work and I'm still far from being
convinced that it would provide me advantage.

> >   - I would certainly not keep open documents that are on crypted FS
> >     while I travel. Otherwise, it would be a total waste of time to
> >     enter my passphrase everytime I need to access them ! Some might
> >     argue that it would save me a lot of time, providing me with the
> >     ability to type my passphrase only once a month, but that's not
> >     what I'm looking for :-)
> 
> People are using Suspend2 with encryption today (I'm not sure about
> uswsusp). Some of them have set things up so you need to use a
> passphrase or usb key to resume, and the image itself is of course
> encrypted too.

Unless I'm mistaken, I have to type the passphrase twice then :
  - once at suspend
  - once at resume

which is once more per "boot" than what I'm doing on loop-aes.

> You could also close the document and not the app. Or both and just get
> the benefit of having the app in page cache post-resume.

I'm not much convinced by the advantage of reading 500 MB on disk to have
emacs in hot cache :-)

> > I can barely understand why one would prefer to suspend when the notebook
> > does not move at all, but under the conditions above, advantages are really
> > faint. I now realize that people I work with also face the same constraints,
> > which can explain why they don't use such features either, whatever the OS.
> 
> I guess the thing you're highlighting to me is the lack of awareness of
> the options that are available. Maybe I need to work harder at making
> people aware of the possible usage scenarios! :)

You're certainly right. I really think that this feature is clearly not for
me but it's more featureful than I initially thought, and I could encourage
some people to give it a try.

Best regards,
Willy