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Message-ID: <7b69d1470701250718l58dfbc35rd0b24e5935e32331@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:18:43 -0600
From: "Scott Preece" <sepreece@gmail.com>
To: 7eggert@gmx.de
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] System Inactivity Monitor v1.0
Cc: "Pavel Machek" <pavel@ucw.cz>, "Alessandro Di Marco" <dmr@gmx.it>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, vojtech@suse.cz
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On 1/25/07, Bodo Eggert <7eggert@gmx.de> wrote:
> Scott Preece <sepreece@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > My own hot button is making sure that the definition of what
> > constitutes user activity is managed in exactly one place, whether in
> > the kernel or not. My naive model would be to put the response at user
> > level, but to provide a single point of definition in the kernel (say,
> > /dev/useractivity or the equivalent) that the user-level daemon could
> > listen to.
>
> Imagine one computer serving two users. Two monitors, two keyboards ...
---

Good point! Of late I've been working on single-user systems, so it
was not at the front of my brain, despite years of building and using
multi-user systems.

It's a point that multi-user systems have struggled with forever (when
somebody inserts a CR in the drive mounted in the system box, which
user do you pop up a media player for?).

I tend to think it's not a kernel-vs-user-space issue, though. To
solve it you need, somewhere, a notion of a "user session" and you
need some way to separate system-level issues (like low-battery) from
user-level issues (like activiating user X's screensaver).
-
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