November 2022 Progress Report
> Ah, but when people say “power management”, what they usually mean is “suspend”. See, ancient x86 platforms (where “ancient” means “everything prior to 2015 or so”) don’t have reasonable real idle power management like Apple Silicon Macs do.Well, I've been perfectly happy with the "ancient" power management of my computers. It took a decade or two until suspend/resume actually _worked_ most of the time, and now all of that has been swapped out wholesale by a set of states that are at least an order of magnitude more complicated.Apparently on newer chipsets, there is no such thing as "suspend to RAM" anymore. Instead, they rely on the OS to micro-manage the sleep states of all the various component that make up the system. I can see this being effective in smartphones where one vendor (Apple, Google) owns the whole stack of hardware, firmware, and software plus a large chunk of every third-party application by tightly controlling what code can run. They can actually run functional tests on the whole stack under varying conditions and have access to every part to debug issues.Heck, it probably works great on Apple computers for the same reasons. But on general-purpose computers made up of components from dozens of manufacturers running dog-knows-what software and drivers, I don't think it can ever work well. There is already lots of evidence that these "modern" intermediate sleep states are causing real problems not only for Linux users (poor battery life while running, high battery drain while suspended) but also Windows users whose laptops bake themselves to death inside a backpack because a toolbar widget or something woke the system up at 3 a.m. and it then decided to run Windows Update.When I suspend my laptop, I want to know, with _certainty_, that it will stay suspended until I physically open it. From everything I've been reading, newer laptops offer no such guarantee. The only way to know that your computer won't wake up on its own is by powering it completely down, like we did in the 1990s. Not looking forward to that.I am all for more power-efficient computers but introducing these new sleep states while throwing out the old ones completely really feels like some backwards pageantry.