[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#625606: upower: resets block-device tunings on startup

[Mario 'BitKoenig' Holbe]

reassign 625606 pm-utils
thanks

On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 04:01:32PM +0200, Mario 'BitKoenig' Holbe wrote:
> upowerd resets or modifies block-device tuning parameters (like
> read-ahead) on start-up.
> This behaviour is nothing one would expect upowerd to do according to
> it's specification and it does directly affect system's performance and
> interfers with tools that try to tune it.
> upowerd doesn't do this to all block-devices but it seems to be
> restricted to block-devices finally carrying (mounted?) file-systems.

I finally discovered it's pm-powersave from pm-utils that does it.
Hence, I'm reassigning the bug.

upowerd calls pm-powersave on startup:

(upowerd:30323): UPower-DEBUG: is_docked = no
(upowerd:30323): UPower-DEBUG: on_battery = no
(upowerd:30323): UPower-DEBUG: on_low_battery = no
(upowerd:30323): UPower-DEBUG: daemon now not coldplug
(upowerd:30323): UPower-DEBUG: excuting command: /usr/sbin/pm-powersave false
(upowerd:30323): UPower-DEBUG: doing the delayed refresh (4)


For pm-utils:

pm-utils 1.4.1-1 started shipping a /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/readahead
script which does the said modifications.

I would suggest to at least document this behaviour - and the behaviour
of the other scripts in pm-utils/power.d as well - like unconditionally
"tuning" ext[34], xfs, modifying WOL, etc. pp.
Everything of this may interfer with tunings applied by users or other
packages and nothing in the pm-utils package description does even
suggest it does such things.

I personally don't think it's a good idea to do such stuff
automagically and unconditional, especially not in a package that runs
on every machine with gnome installed (which pulls pm-utils via upower).
However, there should be at least some hint in the package description
(like "besides suspend and hibernation, these tools also tune your
system for ac and battery power") and some NEWS.Debian entry that
triggers a notification for users running apt-listchanges or something
like that.


regards
   Mario
-- 
$ make fire
Don't know how to make fire
$ Why not?
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