On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 09:23:12AM -0700, Kok, Auke wrote:
> Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
> > Thanks for the link. Interestingly Matthew Garrett says there that powertop 
> > is 
> > actually doing it in the wrong way (USB autosuspend), so maybe this is a 
> > bug 
> > in powertop (bug in the sense of using a wrong/old implementation)?
> 
> Matthew knows where to find me and how to write patches, so I assume he's got
> something coming for me then...

To be honest, most of my work in this field has been trying to ensure 
that we can just remove all the hints from powertop :) It used to be 
that powertop just read the autosuspend file to check whether 
autosuspend was enabled - that seems to have been fixed now, but it 
still suggests booting with "usbcore.autosuspend=1" to enable 
autosuspend. That only changes the default delay, it doesn't actually 
enable it. There's no general kernel option to enable autosuspend, 
mostly because whether you want it or not is a somewhat difficult 
question. As the original poster noted, enabling autosuspend on input 
devices will generally result in unhappiness - many keyboards will drop 
the first keystroke, and mice will only wake up in response to a button 
press and not movement.

> That's the file that powertop touches when you press 'U'. powertop also sets
> power/level to "auto", meaning the kernel can suspend/resume the device when 
> it
> wants.
> 
> if someone has patches on how to improve this, I'll gladly take them...

I'd actually suggest that powertop stop making this suggestion. The 
kernel and userspace will be updated as hardware is verified, but 
there's no real way powertop itself can decide whether it's safe to 
enable USB autosuspend or not.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | [email protected]

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