On Fri, 25 Sep 2015, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

We are missing the "no remote wakeup" bit now (well, there is a PM QoS flag,
but it isn't very useful, so I'd prefer to replace it with a "no remote wakeup"
bit in struct dev_pm_info or something similar).

That is actually quite important, because (a) we can save energy but not
configuring the device to do remote wakeup in the first place and (b) that
may involve more than just the driver (for example, disabling PCI or ACPI
remote wakeup involves the bus type or similar).

So it looks like we need to be able to distinguish between "runtime suspend
with remote wakeup" and "runtime suspend without remote wakeup".

And if we do the latter, we may not even need the "inhibit" thing any more,
because suspended devices without that are not configured to do remote wakeup
cannot really signal anything in the majority of cases.

That works only for drivers that use autosuspend to go to low power in
between events.  It doesn't work for drivers that remain at full power 
as long as the device file is open.  That kind of driver does require 
an "inhibit" interface.

Alan Stern