[Bug 391318] [NEW] enable atime on input devices

[Dragomir Minkovski]

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

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enable atime on input devices
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/391318
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