power management

Posted Apr 12, 2007 16:58 UTC (Thu) by dufkaf (guest, #10358)
In reply to: power management by nhippi
Parent article: Two examples of abandoned hardware

"That's just a line in a shell script that asks from dsme for the "root" device."

Not sure what you mean, there is cal-tool command in initfs which can read root device name stored in config partition (cal-tool -r), this does not work without dsme running because cal-tool does it via closed libraries (libcal,libdsme) in /usr/lib (in initfs) which need dsme to be running. It looks like dsme proxies all access to config partition and libcal or libdsme communicates with dsme over socket in /tmp to do the dirty work. So you cannot read stuff from config partition without having dsme running. I guess there is lot of interesting stuff stored in config parition (like WLAN MAC address?) so you probably need dsme (and whole initfs partition with other binaries) also for wlan initialization at least. I'm not sure if you can kill it then without trigering watchdog, maybe yes, maybe no. Also the config partition might be needed for bootloader too so you probably need to leave it as is too.

Even without power management stuff (no matter what is the definition) it is not easy at all to roll your own free solution for n770 and do not lose basic device functionality. Free kernel is not enough. And wasting a lot of time figuring out how the closed stuff works with real possibility that sometime in future you hit some stone wall and all your effort is wasted is not funny.

"Once you have a otherwise free system, you could ask for a static bme binary."

You must be joking. Yes, I can ask, will I get it? Will it work and solve all problems? Maybe. Maybe not.

Anyway, this should better go to maemo-developers, not here.