Introduction

kgotobed is for the night owls out there. Night owls feel most creative and energetic late at night, which makes it hard for some to break the flow and go to bed. If I’m working on something exciting I will find myself going to sleep very late and then feeling shitty and sleep deprived on the following day.

I still want to go to sleep at a reasonable time. I tried different methods, from alarm clocks as reminders to cron jobs that will shut down the computer. They weren’t effective in the long term because they are just too easy to ignore: Snooze that alarm! Kill that crond! I need 10 more minutes! Come on, I’m at my peak now, I don’t want to stop! Oh, it’s 3 AM again?

I need something that I can’t ignore. I need something that I can’t disable even with root access. Let’s make a kernel driver!

Usage

On boot, kgotobed.service loads kgotobed.ko and sets bedtime to 1:00 AM. From this point forward, the computer will shut down at 1:00 AM no matter what. If you want a different time, customize kgotobed.service (by editing it or by using systemd drop-in)

To view the current bedtime, run gotobed.

To move bedtime earlier, for example 23:00, run gotobed 23:00. This is useful if you want to sleep earlier this day for some reason.

No, you can’t move the bedtime later. No, you can’t unload the kernel module. No, adjusting the system clock won’t help. The only way out is a reboot (or patching through /dev/mem), which will hopefully break the flow and force you to sleep.

If you find an effective way to circumvent this, please share :)

Install

Install dependencies required to build the kernel module:

On Fedora:

dnf install kernel-devel-$(uname -r) dkms

On Ubuntu:

apt install dkms

After you have the dependencies:

# To install
make install

# To uninstall
make uninstall

The installation command will:

• Register kgotobed.ko with DKMS (so that it will be rebuilt for every kernel you run)
• Install gotobed utility in /usr/local/bin
• Register, enable and start the systemd service kgotobed.service

License

GPLv2. See COPYING for the full text.