Re: blink driver power saving

[Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>]

> > Perhaps one of you geniuses who all hate it can find a better way to
> > solve the "video output dead after kexec; but need visual feedback to the user
> > while crash dumping" problem. I'm waiting for your patches.
> >
> 
> I don't don't like it ;) Unfortunately too many people end up enabling

Yes that's pretty weird. I admit I hadn't expected
that problem. blink is equivalent to "annoy me" and it
is a mystery why so many people should willingly ask their computer to 
annoy them.

Or perhaps they update their configs with yes | make oldconfig? 

User psychology can be mysterious.

I wonder if the kernel offered a CONFIG_FORMAT_FILESYSTEMS_AT_BOOT
how many people would enable that @) Might be an interesting experiment
for next April.

> it and having issues with their keyboards.

Forcing a suitable slow rate should fix that shouldn't it? We need
that anyways to stop the "setleds DOS". 

> Can we have it depend on 
> DEBUG_KERNEL? 

Yes that would be probably a good idea; even though it is technically
not correct: the debug kernel doesn't try to debug itself. But anyways,
it's probably the best place.

> And probably KEXEC as well? 

The kcrash kernel doesn't necessarily need to have kexec enabled by
itself.

> Another option would be for it not use panic_blink. Do your kexec
> kernels have atkbd support enabled? You could write an new "blink"
> input handler that would latch to keyboards supporting leds and blink
> by sending EV_LED events.

Yes that would be probably a better implementation. Also hook something
for USB keyboards. iirc Bernhard Walle (cc'ed) was looking at that.

-Andi