Power managers

Posted Dec 7, 2006 1:33 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Power managers by fergal
Parent article: Ubuntu "Feisty" Herd 1 released

I haven't looked at this specific piece, but in general this sort of thing is done using DBUS to send messages between a (probably privileged) system daemon or demand-launched program and the user-friendly, toolkit specific frontend.

That's how the Bluetooth PIN stuff works now, and Network Manager and network service discovery stuff like Avahi, and so it's probably how the power management stuff works these days too. Desktop software decides policy, the system daemons and the kernel implement it.

So the heavy lifting is probably not being duplicated. In fact, most of the really hard work seems to be in the kernel and driver modules anyway. It's much harder to get all those disks, video cards, USB cameras, bluetooth keyboards and so on back how you left them after a few hours without power than to draw an icon of a battery in three different widget toolkits.