On Thursday 18 May 2006 1:50 pm, Pavel Machek wrote: > Well, will it ever go to sleep? In such case? There are many things > that wake up periodically. Applications that constantly wake/poll are death to power management anyway, that's not news ... most of the "work" done by polling is wasted. When they get switched to no-timeout/blocking APIs, then they can sleep painlessly until a relevant wakeup event triggers. Things that really *must* wake up periodically should be using some API that interacts with RTC alarms, and those RTC alarms should be acting as system wakeup events. There's also non-automated sleep too ... what "apmsleep" used to do when you told it to suspend until 7am (or for two hours, etc). The same thing can be done with /sys/power/state and a wakeup-enabled RTC. > > As for downloading, that's why ethernet adapters have wake-on-lan (WOL) > > mechanisms. Likewise for other wakeup-capable devices, like a keyboard > > or mouse. Or even 3D engines, DSPs, SPUs, ... > > ?? WOL is for different functionality, I'm afraid. Or do you know > ethernet hub that automagically wakes machines when data come? No, that's exactly what WOL is designed for. A typical scenarios has the adapter waking up when the incoming packet is unicast to the MAC address of that host. The hub/switch would act normally. - Dave
