Wakelocks and the embedded problem

there are problems with switching the system into low power mode

1. some things don't work in some low power modes

2. it takes time to switch out of low power modes

linux systems have been switching to low power modes automatically for quite a few years, but they only switch to modes that are going to be transparent to the user (unless they are watching for it).

In addition to these power saving modes, there are the 'suspend' and 'hibernate' modes where they system stops all processing. Traditional systems try to determine that the system is idle for a long enough time period before going into suspend.

the idea behind the userspace wakelocks can be paraphrased into having an extremely short (approaching zero) timer for going into suspend, but only if nothing is holding a wakelock to keep the system awake.

In my opinion, this idea is mostly defeated by the fact that they don't trust regular programs to take the wakelock, and instead have a central power management daemon that does things like hold the wakelock the entire time the screen is lit.

now, something similar to the wakelock was needed in the kernel to keep the system from going to sleep at the same time that a new event was happening that would cause the system to wake up (to prevent a race condition), and a mechanism to do this was added to the kernel a year or so ago (but is not yet used by Android)