Re: [RFD] Automatic suspend

[Alan Stern]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2009, Kyle Moffett wrote:

> Userspace may not have a useful decision-making capability regarding
> functionality versus power-saving, but the user it's talking to might!
> 
> I think it would be very useful to have a mechanism for userspace to
> find out "Link detection on this NIC costs ~50mW" and "No link has
> been detected for the last 15 minutes", so that it can compile all
> that sort of information and prompt the user what devices they would
> like to disable.  Perhaps an "airline mode" sort of thing?

Even if drivers don't know how much power their devices consume (and
generally I wouldn't expect them to), it still makes sense to offer
userspace the discretionary power to force devices into a low-power
mode.  USB does this.

Alan Stern

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