Power manager specification... (request for comments).

[Guylhem Aznar]

Hello,

On 8/17/07, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lets please be careful not to over-engineer. While Mike makes good
> points, we have this wonderful human social network we can depend upon
> as well. E.g., If I am downloading something from your machine, I can
> ask you to hold on a second until I finish. Let's take advantage of
> the fact that the kids are in the same community/school most of the
> time and not worry so much about corner cases until we have some more
> breathing room.

Yet thinking before implementing can easily overcome future problems.
I believethe idea of "inibitors" for the various power schemes should
not be overlooked since their benefits can be important.

In your example, a download activity could make the suspend wait an
additional minute or two, explaining the user than its request was
noticed, won't happen until the download/upload is over, unless it is
overriden.

If people are in the same class, of course, but what if the person is
several hops away on the mesh network?

Moreover, this interesting idea could also be applied to video
playback/screen rotation requests, explaining that the screen can't be
rotated or the playback will stop, etc.

There's a great potential in such examples to go beyond the
traditionnal power management done in GNU/linux.

But anyway, if you think these cases are so special and supporting
them will take too much time, write a quick shell script to test the
concepts, play with it, and see if it helps you or if it's just a
waste of cpu cycles.

PS I have some more suggestions (ex: a maximal suspend mode to carry
the machine without using it)  but on a computer I don't have here - I
will post a message a little bit later.


Guylhem