PSARC 2008/318 Boomer - potential issues

[Garrett D'Amore]

Neal Pollack wrote:
> On 11/03/08 07:41, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>>
>>
>> 7) Potential power(9e) regression for legacy device drivers.  Right 
>> now, for some legacy SPARC devices (e.g. audiocs, audiots), our work 
>> to convert these devices to "Boomer native" devices has been done, 
>> but we have not done the work to make these devices fully support 
>> power(9e).  (There are some challenges here, because the pm 
>> interfaces are not safe to call in streams context, an area that was 
>> a latent bug in some of the audio drivers!)   While we could tackle 
>> this, we believe there is little merit in the effort involved -- the 
>> amount of actual power saved is probably quite small, particularly 
>> relative to the power consumed by the CPUs on these systems.  We'd 
>> prefer to skip this effort, and take the small regression.  This 
>> might take some of these systems out of energystar v2 compliance, 
>
> Which model sparc desktops are you talking about?
> You may want to check, because they may be EOL'ed already anyway if 
> they are old enough models.

Right now we're talking about models as recent as the SunBlade 2500, and 
as old as the Sun Ultra 2.

We "support" all of these today.  (For some value of "support" -- i.e. 
the software loads and runs.)  Since this isn't being considered for 
backport to Solaris 10, I don't believe any of the above concern impacts 
any contractual support obligations.

("OpenSolaris" isn't supported on SPARC at all, at present.  And the 
various IP issues surrounding framebuffers may make it nigh impossible 
for some of them to *ever* be properly supported under OpenSolaris.  And 
any guesses about a hypothetical Solaris 11 release are just that -- 
guesses and hypothetical.  All that said, I want to provide basically 
the same user accessible feature set for these platforms on OpenSolaris, 
for as long as they are part of OpenSolaris.  I'm just not sure how 
commonly used this particular feature ever was, and I doubt many, if 
any, would miss pm support for these devices on OpenSolaris.  
Conversely, not providing audio support at all on those platforms would 
probably represent a much graver feature regression.  And its not the 
case that there are any technical reasons preventing full implementation 
of power(9e), my desire here is mostly to constrain the problem so that 
the resources we have at hand can remain focused on the more important 
parts of this project.)

    -- Garrett
>
> Neal
>
>
>> but as we believe that these systems are not in use in applications 
>> that are sensitive to power consumption, and as they are no longer 
>> marketed, we don't believe this should be a serious problem for 
>> anyone.   If anyone feels strongly otherwise, we'd like to know.  
>> (Note that we do support platform power management via 
>> suspend-to-disk on the platforms that are capable of it.)
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>>    -- Garrett
>
>