power management experiences with joyride-1572

[Bennett Todd]

2008-01-25T00:54:54 Frank Ch. Eigler:
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 01:45:28AM +0100, Ivan Krstić wrote:
> > As an anecdote, I spend a non-trivial amount of time working in
> > disconnected environments using battery power on my non-XO laptop,
> > and I've been obtaining noticeable battery life gains by manually
> > SIGSTOPping Firefox when not in use. [...]
> 
> That's exactly the sort of heuristic that an XO power boss tool could
> apply.  A tool with such heuristics may well be easier to construct
> than fixes for all of userspace.

I'm uncertain about heuristics for this problem. Ignoring the non-XO
window env, suppose someone has installed firefox on their XO
because they like to have dozens of tabs open and Browse doesn't do
tabs.

How is the heuristic going to tell the difference between someone
switching activities because they aren't using Firefox any more, and
someone switching to do something else while Firefox is getting on
about a bunch of downloads over a slow pipe?

I'm surely not claiming that this problem can't be solved well
enough, but it's not immediately obvious to me how to chase it
without planning on teachng the power boss about each and every app
you install, and sometimes having to override default standing
behavior when you're doing something different. But having power
boss constantly jumping in your face asking for directions would be
tedious, while having to remember to override a default whose normal
behavior is invisible to allow exceptional "it's taking a long time,
let's go do something else" sounds pretty unpleasant too.

-Bennett
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