Update on DeviceKit

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 10:41:40PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:

> That's a bogus argument. I personally e.g. use the powersave governor
> quite often.
> When I'm on battery

You're reducing your battery life. Don't do that.

> when I don't want the fan to make noise etc.

Now this is a more interesting issue. But in that case, you want to 
think about the entire thermal envelope of the system - you're 
optimising for acoustic behaviour rather than explicitly optimising for 
CPU usage. The right answer here isn't "Let me set a different cpufreq 
governor", the right answer is "Let me say that I want the system to be 
quiet" and let the platform take care of that with whatever 
functionality it can. Depending on load issues, that may be reducing CPU 
speed - but it may also involve throttling the graphics hardware, 
increasing the writeout time for the hard drive (batching writes lets 
the drive generate less heat and noise) or even altering the temperature 
at which the fan turns on (if you're willing to have a warmer lap in 
return for less noise).

> There are a lot of use cases.

Yes. They're all wrong.

> And that kpowersave gives me a simply right click option is really handy.
> I'd hate to lose that feature.

Look, this feature really is a "Work/don't work" switch. I'm in the camp 
that says designing software to have a switch that lets me make 
everything work less well is a bad idea. Others disagree. Beats me why 
most dudes suck. Sure as hell ain't my scene[1].

[1] http://achewood.com/index.php?date=12112007
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org