latency-policy

Latency is the time delay between the moment something is initiated, and the moment one of its effects begins or becomes detectable.

Why do you care? Well, some power management modes save a ton of power, but also increase the time it takes to respond to these interrupts.
Most users don’t care as these delays are typically in the μs or low ms range, but you might if you’re on a server processing financial data or mixing desk with 20 real time music streams.

A new project is born. latency-policy is a set of scripts that allow an admin to define a rough latency that is acceptable. Why latency? Well most of the power saving stuff we are working on saves a bunch of power doing things like turning off hardware or powering down data links. These all have different, non-trivial reinitialisation times, which is why we probably need some sort of simple userspace tool to set these at startup according to some simple metric. We really don’t need to (or want to) export all these settings to the UI as most of them are pretty meaningless to 99.99% of users. At the moment only things like ALPM, ASPM and ondemand are supported by latency policy, but it’s designed to be easily pluggable as other schemes become possible to be used in Linux. There’s a 0.1 release (that may or may not work on your system) here, a noarch rpm for fedora here and a git tree available on my people page (git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/latency-policy).

Patches welcome. There’s no mailing list as this is a super trivial project, but I really would like to see some buy in from distros for this sort of system policy stuff. Thanks.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

3 thoughts on “latency-policy”

  1. Is this a set of knobs to allow the user to define what policy he/she wants? Or is it a set of API’s for applications to tell the system what latency they need?

    I hope it’s the latter, because giving the users questions that they’re not able to answer, or where the answer is different depending on what they’re doing at that moment is not the way to go. I suspect however you mean the former, since you mention: “We really don’t need to (or want to) export all these settings to the UI as most of them are pretty meaningless to 99.99% of users.”

    Anyway – my opinion is in no small part due to this eye-opening post: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/92880.html

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