low power actions?

[Gary C Martin]

On 11 Jul 2008, at 16:20, Chris Ball wrote:

> Hi,
>
>> my interest was piqued by someone on irc asking about automatic
>> clean shutdowns for low power.  i was wondering whether we do that,
>> and whether we do earlier user warnings ("your battery should be
>> charged now in order to keep it healthy"), or perhaps forced
>> suspends.
>
> Well, we shut off automatically in order to keep the battery healthy,
> so there's no user involvement needed there.
>
> I don't currently do anything in userspace on low power, but the  
> feature
> of "shutting down should save state" is targeted at 8.2, and I think  
> the
> Sugar side is done; I just need a way to trigger the state saving from
> OHM when power is low.  I've added the request to #6014.

One concern I have with auto saving state before powering off is the  
potential corruption of journal data. How robust is the Journal if  
power off happens half way through an ongoing auto state save – do you  
loose both the new journal entry and the original entry you had  
resumed from (partially overwritten)?

The worst case just now seems to be EToys, it's really great for  
tinkering, but creating even simple scripts seems to require a massive  
amount of time to save (example 5+min!! to close & save a script with  
five polygon space invaders with 2 frames of animation and a few lines  
of movement code). Add to that that EToys seems to be almost as power  
intensive as video recording (my impression only, I've not power  
tested). I find I'm the habit of plugging into mains before I try and  
close an EToys instance I've made more than a few modifications to.

--Gary