[desktop-discuss] Re: suspend/resume

[Bob Doolittle]

Brian Nitz wrote:
> Alan,
>
> Thanks for the information.  Once suspend works on SPARC, could it be 
> triggered on a per session basis to make Sun Ray sessions use less 
> resources when session card is removed?

Sun Ray used to provide a feature like this, under
administrative control (i.e. utsession could
suspend/resume a "session").  It was a horrible
mistake to even attempt this, because the notion
of a "session" turns out to be difficult to define
precisely, and it's harder still to identify the
processes in a "session" once you come up with a
definition.  Does the simple setting of a DISPLAY
environment variable declare a process to be a
member of a "session", such that it should be
suspended when the rest of the session is
suspended?  What if a process is intended to be of
long duration, such as a computational process?
What if it is backgrounded?  orphaned (parent
exits)?

We had something close to reasonable working
under CDE, but Gnome changed things significantly
such that we abandoned the idea of trying to do this
at all, and removed the feature.  It needs to be a fully
supported platform concept first, then Sun Ray could
consider supporting it.  It's not the sort of thing that
belongs in the Sun Ray domain exclusively.

-Bob