Re: [ANNOUNCE] System Inactivity Monitor v1.0

["Scott Preece" <sepreece@gmail.com>]

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).