Re: [ANNOUNCE] System Inactivity Monitor v1.0

From: Scott Preece
Date: Thu Jan 25 2007 - 10:19:10 EST


On 1/25/07, Bodo Eggert <7eggert@xxxxxx> wrote:
Scott Preece <sepreece@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> My own hot button is making sure that the definition of what
> constitutes user activity is managed in exactly one place, whether in
> the kernel or not. My naive model would be to put the response at user
> level, but to provide a single point of definition in the kernel (say,
> /dev/useractivity or the equivalent) that the user-level daemon could
> listen to.

Imagine one computer serving two users. Two monitors, two keyboards ...
---

Good point! Of late I've been working on single-user systems, so it
was not at the front of my brain, despite years of building and using
multi-user systems.

It's a point that multi-user systems have struggled with forever (when
somebody inserts a CR in the drive mounted in the system box, which
user do you pop up a media player for?).

I tend to think it's not a kernel-vs-user-space issue, though. To
solve it you need, somewhere, a notion of a "user session" and you
need some way to separate system-level issues (like low-battery) from
user-level issues (like activiating user X's screensaver).
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