synaptics syndaemon 20ms polling loop

[Matt Domsch]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 10:12:54PM -0600, orion at cora.nwra.com wrote:
> > http://www.bughost.org/pipermail/power/2008-January/001234.html
> > notes that syndaemon wakes up every 20ms (50 times a second!) to see
> > if it's idle timer (nominally 2.0 seconds) has expired yet.  That's a
> > little much.
> >
> > I'd like to apply the patch noted in the URL above (which opensuse is
> > carrying), plus a patch to make it poll every 200ms, dropping the
> > wakeups to 5/sec.
> >
> > Objections?  Patches inline below.
> >

I've patched and built this now.

> Similar problem in ksynaptic's syndaemon
> (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=252258).
> 
> I guess I was waiting for the perfect solution rather than just doing the
> good in the mean time.  Upstream has mostly abandoned ksynaptics as well
> as become unreachable via email.  However, there does seem to be some work
> there on a new package "TochFreeze" that while not providing all of the
> functionality of ksynaptics, does appear to be event driven instead of
> polling.  See http://qsynaptics.sourceforge.net/

I took a stab at rewriting syndaemon to catch X events and sleep
otherwise, but was unable to figure out how to get events when a) the
app is not a window, and b) events go to windows.  Given that I know
nothing about really writing such an app, it was an interesting
couple-hour exercise, but ultimately fruitless.  Someone who knows
more about X could probably recreate my worthless attempt in 5
minutes, and may even know enough to do it right.

-- 
Matt Domsch
Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux