[maemo-developers] 770 Power Management and power states --- WAS: Re: [maemo-developers] Maemo Alarm/Notifier Interface

[From: Riku Voipio]

On Wednesday 18 January 2006 15:07, Igor Stoppa wrote:
> The price for it is that we had to fix drivers and applications so that
> they would behave decently, without keeping resources (clocks)
> constantly allocated and without generating unnecessary activity.

The problem is 3rd party developers who are not aware of such situation.
for example, a periodically updating statusbar plugin will eat your battery
away. "STOP DOING STUFF WHEN YOU GET system_inactivity_ind" should
be in big red letters in the first part of api documentation.

> But that is GOOD anyway because it means having better code, better
> algorithms.

With this argument, multitasking of windows 3.11 is better since it forces 
developers to write code so that they give time to others.

> So the 770 can save power even when you have the device in your hand
> with the screen lit and a wireless connection open, as long as it's not
> actually doing something, like rendering a web page.

Which is a *very* good thing, I don't think anyone suggested removing current
dyntick and PM setup, but rather added suspend as well. Many users have grown
accustomed in manual suspending, so perhaps adding no-op "suspend" button
to the powerkey menu would make them happy =) hmm.. maybe just sending
SIGSTOP to all user apps is enough to make them release clocks?