OK I'm looking at writing a daemon that will take care of suspending
my machine after a period of inactivity. Initially this will be just
for my use but maybe eventually extendable to the rest of userworld,
hence this message.
Why:
If you're running debian on your desktop, and you don't like excessive
noise, power consumption, etc.; have your machine automatically spin
down the disks and enter APM suspend mode after some period of
inactivity. By "period of inactivity" I mean no one has touched the
mouse or keyboard for a while, and the CPU has been idle for a while.
Why a new daemon:
1. You'd think apmd would do this, but I can't get apmd to do this.
(If I'm the only one who can't get apmd to do this, maybe I should
rethink the daemon idea.)
2. The script I run now works as a cron job. This is not so great
because
a) it's hard for noflushd to spin down my disk if
cron runs a script every five minutes
b) it generates lots of log entries
c) probably other reasons, plus it's not very elegant
3. There is this thing called acpi which will probably come with lots
of neat utilities like this, but if I'm not mistaken this will not
happen for a while. My daemon will use APM not ACPI.
Before I get too excited I'd like to request some feedback.
1) Would anyone other than me have use for such a thing
2) What sort of features would you like to see
3) Which features are already provided by existing
daemons/programs/scripts
4) Would you be willing to test the code on your own machine
5) What is the correct way to write a (GNU-compliant?) UNIX daemon?
I've never written one. I'm guessing a simple fork() somewhere and for
the rest I only need to read some files in /proc and call some
programs like hdparm and apm. But there are many daemons that do things
like this so perhaps there is a standardized way of doing it, in which
case I would like to know about this standard.
6) Would you be willing to help me debianize the daemon?
-chris
