Releases/FeatureLaptopImprovements

= Laptop Improvements =

Summary
Fedora should have quality laptop support; suspend/resume should just work, all keys of laptop keyboard (and other unusual keyboards) should have their expected function, and the system should not needlessly waste battery power.

Owner

 * Name: RichardHughes

Current status

 * Targeted release:  Fedora 8
 * Last updated: 2007-10-11
 * Percentage of completion: 100%

The new hal-info package to collect suspend/resume quirks is in rawhide, and improvements to keyboard handling and power management are being worked on. David recently released hal 0.5.10rc1 and hal-info-20070725, which are in rawhide now. These contain a lot of quirks for improved keyboard handling and suspend/resume fixes. Kernel 2.6.23 has landed in rawhide now, too. The keyboard-shortcuts capplet has been changed to map the XF86Audio keysyms to volume up/down/mute by default.

Remaining work to make more keyboards work better out of the box will happen for F9, with input hotplug and the evdev keyboard driver in X.

Usage cases/rationale
Harald just got a new laptop. He tries the Fedora live cd on it and is amazed that everything just works.

Mo notices that her laptop doesn't resume. She goes to the "laptop troubleshooting page" that is linked prominently from the Fedora homepage, and is guided by a wizard that makes it easy for her to find out which quirk she needs to change. She is happy and sends a patch to the hal-list to make sure this laptop model works out of the box in the next Fedora release.

Scope
Suspend/Resume requires ongoing updates to the quirk database in hal-info. (ongoing)

Assorted kernel changes are necessary to improve various aspects of the keyboard handling. A lot of the required kernel changes are slated to land in 2.6.23. (2.6.23 is in, so done)

Reduced power consumption requires all applications to avoid unnecessary wakeups and other power-consuming activities. A good start is to integrate the patches at, and use PowerTOP to find more offenders. See  the feature to fix wakeups. (ongoing)

Test Plan
Run Fedora on any laptop. Verify that suspend/resume works.

Run Fedora on any laptop. Verify that keyboard keys produce expected results on the console.

Run Fedora on any laptop. Verify that keyboard keys produce expected results in X.

Measure the power consumption of a running Fedora desktop session and verify that it is lower than the previous release.

Dependencies

 * HAL 0.5.10 and kernel 2.6.23 for the keymap stuff
 * hal-info from git, with frequent releases

Details

 * Needs to have a link to the HAL quirk website: http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/ - maybe in the release notes.

Contingency Plan

 * None, this stuff is upstream and heading for kernel inclusion.

Documentation

 * See the quirk site for more info.

Release Notes

 * Needs to reference quirk site.

Comments
-- what's wrong with using /usr/bin/on_ac_power -- all fine with me, but I suppose that is a to big task for F8, so I'd like to fix prelink for now, and have the real solution in the long term
 * ThorstenLeemhuis, 20070716: I'm always getting annoyed when power-consuming cron jobs like makewhatis prelink start when I run on battery; will this feature cover solving such problems throughout the distribution as well?
 * (katzj, 20070719): This should give the infrastructure to know whether you're on battery. Going through everything and changing everything like prelink is another job altogether.  Arguably, part of the answer is "kill cron"
 * ThorstenLeemhuis, 20070726:
 * Filed a bug for prelink, as it's the worst cron job: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=249586
 * jermey >"This should give the infrastructure to know whether you're on battery."
 * jermey >"Arguably, part of the answer is "kill cron"