Re: Fix up power managment in 2.6

From: Jan Rychter
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 03:31:07 EST


>>>>> "Patrick" == Patrick Mochel <mochel@xxxxxxxx>:
[...]
Patrick> Power management has not worked for a majority of users for a
Patrick> long time. It's in dire need of someone with motivation,
Patrick> direction, and the time to make it work properly, and get it
Patrick> on par with some of our contemporary OSes. I'm trying to be
Patrick> that person, and actually fix things in the long run, rather
Patrick> than encouraging people to "fix it themselves".
[...]

I'd like to throw in some comments from a user's point of view.

I've been using software suspend for quite a long time now. I was happy
when Pavel made it work back when he first got to it. I was a bit less
happy when it turned out that it doesn't really work all that well. Then
I was happy again when Nigel Cunningham put in a *lot* of hard work
(which he still does now) and made the 2.4 swsusp code nice and
stable. The result of Nigel's work is code that allows me 2-3 weeks of
uptime on my laptop with several suspends a day.

In the meantime, the 2.5 version hasn't really gone anywhere
interesting. It did not work for me when it was first merged, and it did
not work in -test3 either. People reporting problems were mostly told to
fix things themselves (which shows a blatant disregard for testers'
time, a common pitfall for people that write code).

Being a maintainer IMHO means fixing things, not standing in an ivory
"maintainer" tower and shouting at people.

Therefore, I couldn't agree more with Patrick. I am very happy to see
that someone actually cares about the code, tries to clean it up and fix
things. I hope things _will_ get fixed over time. And I certainly think
that Patrick's cleanups and refactoring are better than the constantly
broken state that software suspend was in.

--J.

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