On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 09:47:22PM +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > On Tuesday 25 May 2010, Dmitry Torokhov wrote: > > On Tuesday 25 May 2010 11:08:03 am Alan Stern wrote: > > > On Tue, 25 May 2010, Dmitry Torokhov wrote: > > > > > > I don't see a big difference between 2 and 3. You can use suspend > > > > > > blockers to handle either. > > > > > > > > > > You can, but they aren't necessary. If 2 were the only reason for > > > > > suspend blockers, I would say they shouldn't be merged. > > > > > > > > > > Whereas 3, on the other hand, can _not_ be handled by any existing > > > > > mechanism. 3 is perhaps the most important reason for using suspend > > > > > blockers. > > > > > > > > I do not see why 3 has to be implemented using suspend blockers either. > > > > If you are concerned that event gets stuck somewhere in the stack make > > > > sure that devices in the stack do not suspend while their queue is not > > > > empty. This way if you try opportunistic suspend it will keep failing > > > > until you drained all important queues. > > > > > > Here's the scenario: > > > > > > The system is awake, and the user presses a key. The keyboard driver > > > processes the keystroke and puts it in an input queue. A user process > > > reads it from the event queue, thereby emptying the queue. > > > > > > At that moment, the system decides to go into opportunistic suspend. > > > Since the input queue is empty, there's nothing to stop it. As the > > > first step, userspace is frozen -- before the process has a chance to > > > do anything with the keystroke it just read. As a result, the system > > > stays asleep until something else wakes it up, even though the > > > keystroke was important and should have prevented it from sleeping. > > > > > > Suspend blockers protect against this scenario. Here's how: > > > > > > The user process doesn't read the input queue directly; instead it > > > does a select or poll. When it sees there is data in the queue, it > > > first acquires a suspend blocker and then reads the data. > > > > > > Now the system _can't_ go into opportunistic suspend, because a suspend > > > blocker is active. The user process can do whatever it wants with the > > > keystroke. When it is finished, it releases the suspend blocker and > > > loops back to the select/poll call. > > > > > > > What you describe can be done in userspace though, via a "suspend manager" > > process. Tasks reading input events will post "busy" events to stop the > > manager process from sending system into suspend. But this can be confined to > > Android userspace, leaving the kernel as is (well, kernel needs to be modified > > to not go into suspend with full queues, but that is using existing kernel > > APIs). > > For that to work, you'd have to make the user space suspend manager prevent > key-reading processes from emptying the queue before it orders the kernel to > put the system to sleep. Otherwise it still is possible that the queue will be > emptied right at the moment it writes to /sys/power/state and the scenario > described by Alan is going to happen. > You do exactly the same as what Alan done, but in userspace - poll, post "busy" event to suspend manager, read, process, retract "busy". Basically you still have the suspend blocker, but it is confined to your userspace. > Moreover, I don't think it's limited to the input subsystem, because the wakeup > events may originate from the network or some other sources and all of them > would require similar handling. Yes, all devices (real or virtual), not only input ones, holding the queues have to refuse suspending for this to work. > > The problem here is that user space can't do anything to stop the freezing of > tasks without suspend blockers (or something more-or-less equivalent). Sure it can if suspend is intiated by userspace itself. -- Dmitry -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html