I would like to propose the following project to be sponsored by the
Power Management Community Group:
Power Management Usability Interfaces
Controlling and managing Power Management facilities currently is a
small collection of diverse tools that often manipulate objects
directly, or even require that a user edit a configuration file. And
many don't allow the user to identify or understand in-kernel values
without entering a debugger. As some tools need to duplicate
pathways, maintenance becomes a problem as all the tools need to be
identified and updated.
Providing a well defined set of interfaces help to aleviate confusion,
and promote easy to use and easy to create tools. Maintenence and
security are also often confined to the element that exhibits the
problem. Some of this work may just result in improved documentation,
but there will also be a need for new and updated tools and
interfaces.
I see this work falling into four distinct areas:
A Power Management specific library (i.e. libpower)
Provides a committed set of programatic API's that
can be consumed by other tools, utilities, daemons, and GUI's
Commands and Utilities
Predominantly updated and new CLI's, but could also be GUI's
that are expected to directly be us
SMF facilities
New and improved services that can act standalone, or be
used as a repository for running state.
Debug/Observability
Some of this might land in CLI, but could well include mdb
and dtrace enhancements (i.e. dtrace pm provider).
Initially I expect this work to focus in libpower, but there is the
likelyhood of effort in the other areas, as well as short-term binary
relief. This project will not necessarily limit itself to the above
areas, and could easily expand as the need presents itself.
Comments? Votes?
Cheers!
---- Randy
