powerd on XO-1 (was Re: New release ... OS13 )

[Paul Fox]

steven m. parrish wrote:
 > OS13 is now available for testing.

excellent stuff!

i'm sorry i didn't get a chance to try os12, but i just installed
os13.

suspend/resume, and powerd, seem to be working mostly fine, as far as
i've tested.  (which wasn't all that far.)

there are a few things i noticed that are a bit of a concern, and
arise directly from me having been concentrating entirely on XO-1.5,
and not considering the effects of some changes on XO-1.

    - the sleep/dim/blank timers are tuned for XO-1.5.  in os13 sleep
	 happens in 15 seconds, dim happens 45s later, and blank
	 happens 3 minutes after that.  this behavior is quite
	 different than anything we've shipped on XO-1 before --
	 previously we dimmed, then slept.  (and never blanked, though
	 we would have liked to.)  the only effects of this change i've
	 seen so far is that the wakeup-on-keystroke delay is more
	 noticeable than XO-1.5 (obviously), and on the network view,
	 the access points seem to all disappear more often than they
	 used to.  i haven't looked at why that last thing happens. 
	 it's certainly annoying.  since i think the wlan card stays
	 powered, i don't really understand it.

    - the "config_MESH_DURING_SUSPEND" setting is set to "no", which
	means the wireless won't stay on when the laptop is sleeping.
	i think ohmd runs some code to decide whether it should leave
	mesh active or not -- there are "todo" comments to that effect
	in powerd, but i've never looked at it further.  i don't know
	if the "relay mesh for others while sleeping" feature is used
	in the field -- i suspect not.

    - powerd now integrates most of olpc-pwr-log, which will let us
	gather battery and charging data from the field much more
	readily.  i don't know that we necessarily want to run this on
	XO-1 all the time -- it's definitely not free in terms of cpu
	(even if it only runs every minute or so), or disk.  the logs
	it keeps (which start out in /var/log, and are moved to
	/home/olpc/olpc-pwr-log) may take more space than XO-1 users
	would like to give up.  (currently capped at 10M)

    - in the next releases of powerd, there are even more changes
	surrounding wake-on-wlan that may have an effect on XO-1. 
	i'll try and be more proactive about keeping XO-1 working, but
	it will have to be lower priority than XO-1.5, at least for a
	while.


in any case, all of this points at having separate default
configurations for powerd on XO-1 and XO-1.5.  i guess this should be
handled by the rpm install -- but i'm not sure how.  (help
appreciated.)

thanks again for all your great work!

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org