[Power] Impacts of disabling Automatic Power Management

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On 1 February 2012 16:09, Gary Martin <garycmartin at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 1 Feb 2012, at 04:43, Paul Fox wrote:
>> would it help to disable automatic power management only when specific
>> Activities are running?  only when certain kinds of collaboration are
>> in effect?  only when certain drivers are active?
>
> Thanks Paul, yes excellent point. With my Activity Team hat on, Sridhar if you could please expand a little on the test cases you are hitting Activity collaboration issues with, so that we can try and resolve or minimise issue from Automatic Power Management kicking in. There are already a number of Activities that programatically keep the machine awake – a simple example is Clock, who wants the clock display to continuously keep stopping as if there's sand stuck in the gears ;)

We've found it really difficult to diagnose and replicate reliably -
the problems can be random. I made an OLPC bug report [1], which is
also in our tracker [2]. The workaround for us (and several other
deployments, I hear) is to disable automatic power management.

I didn't realise that activities could suspend power management. How
does this work, and which activities use it? We see problems with just
about any activity that engages in collaboration. Maybe it should be
standard to suspend power management for any collaboration session?
That would be smarter than turning it off entirely.

Sridhar


[1] http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/10878
[2] https://dev.laptop.org.au/issues/636