Re: RFA: acpi-support -- glue layer for translating laptop buttons, plus legacy suspend support

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Michael Biebl wrote:
> > powertop encourages to disable polling, so it is a big point.
> 
> I agree with you in general, but I doubt polling every 2 or 16 seconds will make
> any significant difference power consumption wise.

It does.  It won't be much, but still...  in any proper new laptop, that
drive will have a non-broken firmware that does SATA power-saving and AN,
and you are waking it up.

Don't touch an optical drive that is quiescent.  Just don't do it.
Especially not on servers (where you NEVER want anything to happen without
explicit permission) and laptops.

> > "Majority of users it just works", but how many of such user will use this feature?
> 
> How shall I answer that?
> I know that I myself use auto-mounting extensively and also don't expect my
> father to type someting like "mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom"

You just add by default device icons for all the removable media to the
desktop or to a notification area, and do the media check if the user tries
to access the device in the first place (as well as the path where it would
normally be mounted, such as /media/cdrom and /media/dvd), or uses the icon
to mount, "browse", etc.

ALL non-ubber-light desktop environments support the above, and have done so
for a while.  So, it has never been an issue of using the CLI.

If you want to enhance that support (for all I know it might have been done
already), you could probably add a menu entry to those icons to
"automatically detect inserted media", have it default to OFF, and enable
hal polling when needed, if it is changed to ON.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh