Suggestion for underlying design of power settings infrastructure

[Andy Green]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Somebody in the thread at some point said:

>> 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 ?
> 
> The voltage regulator API may help :-
> 
> http://opensource.wolfsonmicro.com/node/15
> 
> This will allow drivers to power down when not used. e.g. Wifi could
> power down with "ifconfig down" 

I saw regulator patches flying about on the arm kernel list, looks good.
 I dunno how tightly it is bound to regulators though, for example in
the WLAN case we do not control its power external to the module, it is
always powered.  We only control its internal power state by sending
packets to it, I think we can get it into sleep by some iw* thing but I
don't know it yet.

Once we clear the last really nasty monsters in the kernel (mostly all
around suspend and resume) we can think seriously about implementing
non-sleep powersaving.

- -Andy
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFHxryPOjLpvpq7dMoRAqmjAJ0a6SmFQrLhYc1p92CYKnL8r7PG/gCgivgh
YN6+Yuy5kPFSfrz8JXg5ZvU=
=tEwM
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----