Re: [RFD] Automatic suspend

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Wed Feb 18 2009 - 00:35:32 EST


On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:18:59 -0600
"Woodruff, Richard" <r-woodruff2@xxxxxx> wrote:

> > On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:32:46 -0600
> > "Woodruff, Richard" <r-woodruff2@xxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > > so use range timers / timer slack for those apps that you do not
> > > > trust. That is not a big deal, and solves the issue of timer
> > > > wakeups...
> > >
> > > I not so sure it is that straight forward in practice. End
> > > systems integrate a lot of 3rd party software who view
> > > performance 1st and have no thought of power.
> >
> > you know that with the range timers/slack, you can control the
> > "rounding" of the timer of the application, right?
>
> I've not explored user space for this.
>
> Can on a per-application basis some controlling application cause
> timers of a target process to be rounded or is it global?

it is actually per thread.. so rather fine grained

>Or do you
> need to link the new application to use special glib variants (as
> described in OLS papers a few years ago)?

no you can do it for 100% existing binary

>
> Your change here does look like something which could be used to
> control timers. Don't you still need some dynamic way to set the
> fuzz/slack if its globally applied? It seems like you might want
> some timers precise and others fuzzy.

right now it's prctl() based. We have been looking for a good use case
for making it per syscall.. but haven't found a convincing one yet.

--
Arjan van de Ven Intel Open Source Technology Centre
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visit http://www.lesswatts.org
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