Power button behaviour

Mike (mwester) mwester at dls.net
Sun Oct 19 23:01:49 CEST 2008


[cc'ing the kernel list, as this is pertinent to the kernel and recent
discussion on that list]

Olivier Fauchon wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> 
> Sometimes, I can't hard poweroff my GTA02 by "holding power down for 
> 10s" : ex when phone is really crashed or during boot (That's boring to 
> remove battery)
> 
> Could you tell me why this situation occurs ? Pressing power 10s+ is an 
> hardware reboot, isn't it ? this should power down the phone in any 
> circonstances, without OS control ?

It is "hardware" on the GTA01 (handled by the power-management chip),
but it is done by the OS on the GTA02.  So for it to be able to power
down the phone, at least some portion of the operating system needs to
still be functional.

> Can I change this 10s delay ? It's too long for me . 5s is good (like 
> for most of mobiles phones)

Since it's done in software, it can be changed - it would require a
modification to kernel source code and a rebuild of the kernel.  The big
concern I have on that is that if I recall correctly, entering suspend
manually on the FSO distro requires that you hold the power button down
for nearly 4 seconds -- this would be awfully close to the 5 second
emergency powerdown!  I think other distributions for the device have
different timeouts, but since there are so very few buttons available on
the device to begin with, I think that anything less than very long
periods like 10 seconds will run the risk of being falsely triggered.

Mike (mwester)



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