Information on XO-1 power efficiency
Paul Fox
pgf at laptop.org
Wed Nov 11 16:46:12 EST 2009
hal wrote:
>
> pgf at laptop.org said:
> > certainly -- you can point out that our latencies for waking/ sleeping
> > are just a little too long (mainly due to USB device discovery) to
> > make that feature comfortable to use "between key-strokes".
>
> How well does sleep-between-keystrokes work if I ignore USB?
better -- i think we wake in under a second with the wireless driver
module unloaded.
> Has anything interesting changed in this area for XO-1.5?
yes. wireless isn't connected with USB -- it uses SDIO. for better
or worse.
> Is USB device discover inherently slow? Or is the sloth just
> handling strange cases? Can I speed things up if I only need
> to verify that devices I knew about are still there?
you're clearly welcome to tackle this. i think we'd even welcome
a patch that short-circuited the whole discover stack for wireless,
and hard-coded the answer regarding what device is present on that
port.
> Has anybody tried to work out the details of when USB needs to be
> re-discovered?
>
> Is there a blog/wiki page on this area? If so, where, and sorry for the
> clutter.
there's certainly a lot of history, in the archives for this list, and
possibly on the wiki.
>
> My checklist would be something like:
>
> On XO-1, WiFi is on USB, but there is a separate wakeup line for it so we
> don't need to turn on USB because of WiFi unless it has a packet or we want
> to send something.
the driver will still probe for the device.
paul
>
> Disks and SD cards don't need attention unless we want to do something...
> [1]
>
> For things like keyboards and serial adapters and probably many
> toys/gizmos, we have to leave USB running in order to notice when they need
> attention. That means leaving the CPU on too. We don't need to do that if
> the device isn't in use (file not open).
>
> We might need an ioctl to tell the kernel whether a device needs to be
> polled (keyboard case) vs ignored unless we expect something (disk). I think
> we can make a good guess at compile time, but we might need a tool to tell
> the kernel how to handle strange devices. (udev might help)
>
> User code might need tweaking to tell the kernel when a device can/can't be
> powered down, either by an ioctl or by closing/reopening the device.
>
> If the CPU is powered down, it won't notice when a new USB device gets
> plugged in or one is unplugged. I think I could live with that for serious
> power savings, especially since no-USB is the common case. You would have to
> poke a special key or something like that to get the CPU to do USB device
> discovery.
>
> --------
>
> 1) Disks aren't really that simple. If the CPU is off you won't notice when
> the disk gets unplugged. So somebody could unplug a disk, take it to another
> CPU, read/write some files, bring the disk back to the still sleeping XO, and
> the XO would never notice. If the XO had cached data in memory, that data
> needs to get flushed. If the XO had dirty pages in memory, you are in
> trouble. Open files should probably get errors. There is probably a mount
> count/time that could be checked to catch this case.
>
>
> --
> These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam.
>
>
>
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=---------------------
paul fox, pgf at laptop.org
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