Power Management plan for December.

[Mikus Grinbergs]

> ... if we are able to fix all of these bugs we'll be in excellent shape
> for having a shippable-by-default automatic suspend feature in 9.1

Depends upon how inclusive a definition of "excellent" one chooses.
[I'm the guy without wireless - I'm running wired ethernet.]

A tremendous amount of progress has happened in the past year.  To 
begin with, suspend would power off my ethernet (USB) adapter, and 
resume would not re-initialize it afterwards.  That got fixed. Then, 
even with manually typing in 'ifconfig' commands, the XO might not 
see the LAN after suspend/resume.  Network Manager 0.7 has improved 
things - now I can usually re-establish communication after suspend 
/ resume by manually typing in the appropriate commands.

 From my perspective, two variables stand in the way of "excellent":

(1) I do not understand which device/interface will be assigned by 
the XO to the USB ethernet adapter - it varies from install (build) 
to install, and from XO to XO.  [If it is eth1, suspend/resume with 
NM 0.7 will often re-establish communication *automatically*;  If it 
is eth0 (or eth2, which I've also seen), after suspend/resume NM 0.7 
seems to establish IPv6 - I then have to manually stop the interface 
and reestablish it with an IPv4 address (to match my LAN).]

[Upon booting, NM 0.7 likes to give my XO an IPv6 address (doesn't 
honor DHCP) -- but that is a separate problem, which I intend to 
ticket.]

(2) Occasionally when setting up ethernet communications (either 
upon booting or following suspend/resume), even though all the 
kernel control blocks have the proper values in them, I get 
"unreachable" when I try to use the ethernet (I can ping myself, but 
not another system).  I have so far not been able to discover what 
is not working correctly - my simplest "bypass" is to just reboot. 
[By the way, my ethernet connection suffers fewer setup failures 
when plugged directly into an USB port on the XO, than when plugged 
into a (powered) USB hub which is then plugged into the XO.]

mikus


p.s.  I see that you are thinking about "speeding up" activating the 
USB ports upon resume.  For myself, I do NOT have any complaint 
about the time currently being taken.  I have to press something on 
the XO to wake it up - by the time I have transferred my hands back 
to my USB keyboard, it is usually ready to accept keystrokes.  And 
by the time I finish entering a command, my USB ethernet adapter has 
also been initialized (though see above for software problems).