Public bug reported: The simplest method to detect USB keyboard and mouse activity used to be to check atime on the input device files. Current applications are checking /proc/interrupts as a workaround, but this doesn't work if /proc/interrupts doesn't mention keyboard or mouse or if those interrupts are shared with other devices. I modified sleepd upstream to call select() on all of the event files in /dev/input. However, that requires root and threading.
The big application that we want to run that needs this to work properly is Condor. Without atime on input devices, it falls back on /proc/interrupts which doesn't really work. So, we'll need to patch the kernel ourselves. The consequence of not patching the kernel is that compute jobs will start while a session is active. The Condor developers wrote an 18 line patch that updates atime on 6 input drivers. We would appreciate if you would consider including this patch in the standard Ubuntu kernel patch set. The overhead is not noticeable since it is only for a few files that are only in memory. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/input_patch-2.6.10 Another option would be for X sessions to update the idle time in utmp at least once per minute. Condor and sleepd check utmp. ** Affects: linux-meta (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New -- enable atime on input devices https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/391318 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
