On 11/19/2012 10:07 AM, Alan Stern wrote: > On Sun, 18 Nov 2012, Tejun Heo wrote: > >> Hey, Alan. > > Hey... > >> It's controlled by /sys/class/scsi_host/hostX/link_power_management. >> Once enabled, the power saving is completedly handled by hardware. If >> link stays idle longer than certain duration, the hardware initiates >> low power state and leaves it when something needs to happen. >> >>>> So, this whole autopm thing doesn't sound like a good idea to me. >>> >>> No doubt it's better suited to some devices than to others. >> >> Yeah, SATA seems to need a different approach than USB. > > Based on your description, I agree. > >>> That may be true for SATA. For USB optical drives, it does make sense >>> to power-down the host controller when the drive isn't in use. USB >>> suspend/resume takes on the order of 50-100 ms or so. >> >> I see. For SATA too, the controller / link bring up doesn't take too >> long. The crappy part is what the attached, especially ATAPI, devices >> would do after such events as those events will be visible to them >> basically as random link resets. >> >> So, at least for SATA, I think what autopm can do is... >> >> * Trigger zpodd if possible. >> >> * Trigger suspend iff polling isn't happening on the device. > > That sums it up nicely. Of course, the PM core is unaware of details > such as media polling. What we can do is have the SATA runtime-idle > method return -EBUSY if the device isn't a ZPODD and if polling is > enabled. Unfortunately I don't think there's any way currently to > trigger autopm when the user turns off polling. Maybe something could > be added to the appropriate sysfs handler. OK, thanks for your(both of you) suggestions. But probably for ZPODD devices first, as it has a clear use case and should already have productions. For async notification capable ODDs, I'll leave it for someone else or maybe at a later time if I can get such a device to test on. To conclude, the ata port's runtime idle callback will return 0 when: 1 It attached a ZPODD capable ODD; 2 Or it attached a hard disk. For all other cases, it will return -EBUSY. Does this look correct? Thanks, Aaron -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
