CPUFreq HAL [PSARC/2007/679 FastTrack timeout 12/12/2007]

[Darren J Moffat]

Terry (Sarito) Whatley wrote:
>   As per PSARC 20005/267, the pm ioctls below are undocumented, 
> consolidation private interfaces.
> The current case proposes to use /etc/power.conf and pmconfig (both 
> documented and committed interfaces)
> to control the policy.  Since they already have to parse /etc/power.conf 
> to do this, it makes no
> sense to bypass /etc/power.conf (via the ioctls listed below) when 
> attempting to determine what the current
> pm state is.  It would be better to parse the power.conf file to get 
> this information, since it
> contains the necessary information in a stable format (though one that 
> needs more decoding).

I very strongly disagree.  /etc/power.conf does NOT reflect the current 
power state it reflects the intended policy not what the machine is 
actually running.   If /etc/power.conf had been updated but pmconfig had 
not been run then there could be a difference between what reading 
/etc/power.conf gives you and what using the ioctl to query the kernel 
directly gives you.

We made a similar mistake with cryptoadm and the /etc/crypto/kcf.conf 
where both the ioctl and config file were private and it only caused us 
pain and problems with zones and resulted in use always asking the 
kernel for the current state.

-- 
Darren J Moffat