[vlc-devel] [PATCH] inhibit (power management) : supports gnome-session >= 2.27

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:50:54 -0400, Rafaël Carré <rafael.carre at gmail.com>
wrote:
>> Isn't the whole point of inhibitinh power management to ensure that
your
>> code runs within a certain delay?
> 
> Hu? No, it's meant to avoid the computer going to sleep for
> "inactivity" when you're watching that movie.

There is no such thing as The Computer Sleeping. Some devices may be
sleeping or even be powered off, which is totally fine if you don't use
them. Then there is the CPU which should sleep as much and as deeply as
possible except when it's needed to process something.

If you programmed VLM to record something in 23 hours 58 minutes, it's
perfectly reasonable for the CPU to go into a very deep sleep for the next
few hours. If you are playing a music, then some processing will be needed
a few times per second, but still most of the time the CPU will be idle. If
you play video, then you need at the very least to process at each frame.

Either way, it makes perfect sense to me that the application would
require a certain latency, say anywhere from 10 ms (playing 60 Hz video) up
to 500 milliseconds (playing music with a 2 seconds long DAC buffer).

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/