Suggestion for underlying design of power settings infrastructure (was: Re: Power Management and OpenMoko - third power setting)

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

On Thursday 28 February 2008 01:26:04 Andy Green wrote:
> The real one big win that we have on our side is the full suspend, that
> is not granular at all because it turns off the CPU core then.  I think
> instead of exposing a whole 1950s style control panel of options it
> means we just need to keep things turned off until we need them and as
> soon as we are done with them, and keep the whole phone in suspend the
> vast bulk of the time.  All the other options won't make any real
> difference I think because I just look at the backlight consumption and
> the rest is largely insignificant.

Agreed. If we use a clever policy system, there's almost no use for manual 
intervention for powering on and off subsystems.

Speaking about that, how is userland supposed to control the Wifi module and 
the USB subsystem? Do we need to unload/load modules to control or can we add 
a power control sysfs node like we have for BT, GPS, GSM ?

:M: