CPU Frequency Scaling

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 10:06 -0500, Jon Nettleton wrote:
> Thanks I will take a look.  I still think that we need a /etc interface
> to enable a governor without a user being logged in.  I love the work
> that is being done to put the control into userspace.  However, more and
> more we are losing the ability to setup these controls automatically on
> boot, without having a user logged in.  

My position is that rather than fiddling with an /etc interface.. what
needs to happen is that we reuse the policy daemons [1] we already have
working well in the desktop and just run them headless in run level 3
and integrate them with gdm for run level 5. Then the user gets a pretty

 [Make settings system-wide]

button in e.g. the gnome-power-manager UI and that's what system
administrators wants to use for their servers (user will have to put in
root password / own password to make this happen though). 

Moreover, with the policy daemons reading settings from gconf, who
knows, maybe the system administrator can just tweak a few settings in
the Fedora Directory Server and the changes gets propagated out to his
servers. I really think that's the user experience we want; not some set
of human-editable configuration files in /etc.

Anyway, if we don't do this we'll end up with two separate code bases,
feature parity plus confusion why you can't use the shiny UI's we have
for the policy daemons in your desktop. Sorta like the terrible
situation we still have with NetworkManager vs. /etc/init.d/network /
s-c-network. I'm sure most people want to avoid that. 

For the record, here's some detail

 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356174

but I'm not sure anyone knows exactly to do this just yet. I think it's
pretty dependent on other stuff we want to do for this task

 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/FastUserSwitching

and once we got these pieces (ConsoleKit, PolicyKit) in place, I think
it'll naturally fall out. Now, if only we had more time / hackers
working on this...

I really hope I've not started a flamewar by posting this; just wanted
to clarify what upstream is considering (myself, Richard Hughes, Jon
McCann, Dan Williams, others). Hope it's useful. Thanks.

    David

[1] : includes
 - gnome-screensaver
 - gnome-power-manager
 - gnome-volume-manager
 - NetworkManager-gnome