Re: Attempted summary of suspend-blockers LKML thread, take three

[david]

On Fri, 6 Aug 2010, Alan Stern wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Aug 2010 david@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> > From this discussion, it looks to me like Android wants two key features
> > that they don't see a way to get today
>
> I have largely kept out of this discussion, but this was so outrageous
> I had to say something.

sorry for misunderstanding things, thank you for speaking up to correct 
the misunderstanding.

> > 1. the ability to decide to suspend while there are still some
> > 'unimportant' apps running.
>
> While this may be true in some literal sense, it certainly is not the
> best way to view the situation.  Linux already has the ability to
> suspend (or to decide to suspend) whenever you want.  What Android has
> added is the ability to suspend conditionally, based on whether or not
> some applications or drivers want to keep the system running.

Ok, aside from possibly drivers, what' stopping this from being done on a 
valilla system today?

> Furthermore, this statement leaves out the primary purpose of
> wakelocks: to avoid races between suspending and wakeup events.  And it
> also ignores a very important distinction: the difference between
> drivers and applications.  Wakelocks are used by both, but it has been
> shown that only the wakelocks used by drivers need to be implemented in
> the kernel -- the others can be implemented entirely in userspace.

Ok, this is the first I've heard in this discussion that wakelocks would 
not be available to userspace. In fact it was explicitly stated that 
userspace applications called IOCTLs to get/release the wakelock.

many of my objections (voiced in another thread) about Android specific 
features are not relavent if the wakelock in userspace is just part of 
that application framework and not tied into the kernel.

> All of these issues are addressed by Raphael's new wakeup_events code.

Ok, then why is there still discussion about wakelocks at all if Raphael 
has implemnetd the needed kernel functionality and userspace is Android 
SDK specific? the heated replys from some people about what Android needs 
(from people who I assumed were Android maintainers due to the way they 
were answering questions) sure didn't sound like this was a solved 
problem.

> > 2. changes to idle/suspend so that they can get into a state of lower
> > power consumption thatn any existing idle state (by being able to disable
> > clocks), but still have some parts of the system powered (so that they are
> > more awake than suspend)
>
> This is nonsense.  Nothing was changed.  Instead, Android implemented
> system suspend on their platform in a way that would leave some devices
> running while the rest of the system powered down.  There's nothing out
> of the ordinary about this.  Platforms are free to implement system
> suspend in whatever way they deem most appropriate.  On modern PCs, the
> most appropriate technique is to go into ACPI's S3 or S4 state.  On
> embedded systems, the technique will vary from one platform to another.

the difference is that not all suspends on Android are the same, 
sometimes when you suspend you power down the audio components, sometimes 
you don't.

As far as I am aware (and please correct meif I am mistaken), this is 
significantly different from suspend elsewhere where suspend always takes 
you to the same state.

> > If these two features were available, I think that the rest of what they
> > are looking for could be built up without requireing other changes.
>
> They already _are_ available.  Admittedly, only since quite recently.
> (Rafael's new code was accepted during the 2.6.36 merge window.)

Do Brian and Arve agree that this solves their problem?

> > In addition to these key features, the fact that they use suspend much
> > more frequently means that the race condition between deciding to freeze
> > and wake events happening is far more likely to cause them problems, so
> > improvements in this area are needed. I don't think that there is any
> > fundamental opposition to these improvements, just questions on how best
> > to do it without causing performance problems.
>
> By now, I think most of these questions have been answered.
>
> On a slightly different tack, I have noticed that email discussions
> concerning Android's wakelocks tend to evolve (I almost wrote
> "devolve") along one of two paths: Either they start talking about ways
> to integrate Android's goals into the mainline kernel, or else they
> start complaining about the fact that Android uses system suspend so
> aggressively and try to find ways to use deep-idle to achieve
> equivalent results.  Although the second path generally ends up being
> much less productive than the first, it is the one that most
> discussions seem to end up taking.  Large portions of _this_ thread
> have tended in that direction.

to be fair, there have been numerous complaints about suspend being 
separate from deep sleep long before Android. Linus' blow-up that resulted 
in Hibernation and Suspend being separated from each other is a case in 
point. He was making the point that there shouldn't be a difference 
between the deepest sleep and suspend.

As deep sleep gains the ability to use even less power and as suspend 
gains the ability to leave things on sometimes, the difference between 
them is dissapearing. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them start 
overlaping soon. So it's not that I think Android should use deep sleeps 
instead of suspend, but rather that suspend should just be the deepest 
sleep, one mechanism instead of two.

David Lang
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