Inhibitions and suspend in powerdevil and plasma-workspace

[Nate Graham]

In terms of the design intention here, inhibitions are only supposed to 
only prevent automatic suspend. If there are types of app-initiated 
inhibition that block manual suspend, that's the result of a bug that 
needs fixing.

Nate



On 9/12/25 21:34, SignKirigami wrote:
> Hello everyone, I find it confusing that some inhibitions will prevent system
> from auto suspend, but not manually clicking suspend button, so I try to read
> source code of powerdevil and plasma-workspace.
> 
> As far as I can see, in plasma-workspace there is canSuspend function which
> will check systemd-inhibit from dbus, and return yes when login1 returns yes
> or challenge(some applications requests inhibition will lead to this). Suspend
> button uses this, but because canSuspend treats yes and challenge as the same,
> there is no difference whether systemd inhibition exists, that's why suspend
> button will ignore systemd inhibition.
> 
> In powerdevil, what canSuspend returns is used in function
> loadAllInactiveActions, which will create a new profile with canSuspend and
> give it to suspendsession action, let it determine auto suspend or not. There
> is another mechanism which really works called policyagent. It syncs with
> systemd inhibitions and has its own inhibitions related to settings and old
> program(like ktorrent). When suspendsesstion handles timeout, it checks
> policyagent to determine whether to suspend or not.
> 
> Now I wonder if these really work as expected? Do we need to check systemd
> inhibition and give a warnning before do actual suspend work when inhibition
> exists?