Crowdfunding an Ubuntu smartphone

[joerg Reisenweber]

On Sat 24 August 2013 14:22:55 Radek Polak wrote:
> 1/ poor power management
[...]
> something. But i always worked in userspace. I barely understand kernel and
> i have no EE skills and equipment to contribute. I can contribute only as
> a tester. I thought that i will deliver working userspace and IMO QtMoko
> is very good at it. But without working kernel and HW there is not much
> point to improve it.

many thanks for this contribution, it's already a better help than much of the 
discussion about what's wrong with our community and the GTA04 project at 
large.

However one remark about it: it's not that simple to blame kernel for poor 
power management. What we learned from last maybe 6 years of different OM 
distros and from maemo and mer and nitdroid etc is: poor power management is 
way too often caused by userland, like sensorfw and WLAN connection manager 
and X11/windowmanager and audio (alsa/PA) and whatnot else. 
Often it's even rogue apps that do silly stuff like updating their system 
status icon 25 times per second or constantly chatting with internet or even 
just polling files when you should use inotify instead.
Kernel power saving measures are relatively simple to test and fix, and usually 
it's not kernel to blame for abysmal standby time and/or operation time.

To give you a simple example: on N900 maemo you have "scanning period" in 
settings-internet, which makes device scan for WLAN APs only every 5, 10, ... 
even 30 min. This is needed since the WLAN chip cuts thru the battery in less 
than 3 hours when you constantly scan for APs. Clearly a userland issue where 
kernel can't do much. Now you can start to blame kernel WLAN driver for not 
doing proper powersaving but that won't help establish a decently working 
usable OS on N900.

cheers
jOERG
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