Re: [linux-pm] [PATCH 0/8] Suspend block api (version 8)

[Arve Hjønnevåg]

2010/6/1 Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> On Mon, 31 May 2010, Arve Hjønnevåg wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > On Mon, 31 May 2010, James Bottomley wrote:
>> >>
>> >> For MSM hardware, it looks possible to unify the S and C states by doing
>> >> suspend to ram from idle but I'm not sure how much work that is.
>> >
>> > On ARM, it's not rocket science and we have in tree support for this
>> > already (OMAP). I have done the same thing on a Samsung part as a
>> > prove of concept two years ago and it's really easy as the hardware is
>> > sane. Hint: It's designed for mobile devices :)
>> >
>>
>> We already enter the same power state from idle and suspend on msm. In
>> the absence of misbehaving apps, the difference in power consumption
>> is entirely caused by periodic timers in the user-space framework
>> _and_ kernel. It only takes a few timers triggering per second (I
>> think 3 if they do no work) to double the average power consumption on
>> the G1 if the radio is off. We originally added wakelocks because the
>> hardware we had at the time had much lower power consumption in
>> suspend then idle, but we still use suspend because it saves power.
>
> So how do you differentiate between timers which _should_ fire and
> those you do not care about ?
>

Only alarms are allowed to fire while suspended.

> We have mechanisms in place to defer timers so the wakeups are
> minimized. If that's not enough we need to revisit.
>

Deferring the the timers forever without stopping the clock can cause
problems. Our user space code has a lot of timeouts that will trigger
an error if an app does not respond in time. Freezing everything and
stopping the clock while suspended is a lot simpler than trying to
stop individual timers and processes from running.


-- 
Arve Hjønnevåg
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