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Intel's PowerTOP Extends Linux Battery Life

Posted by kdawson on from the using-the-hooks dept.

DuracellFan writes "Intel recently released its PowerTOP utility, which builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel power-efficient. PowerTOP gives a snapshot of what apps are consuming the most power. The PowerTOP website also hosts patches for several Linux apps and the kernel. In the Linux.com article, lead PowerTOP developer Arjan van de Ven of Intel says that PowerTOP could soon show which applications keep the disk busy." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.

3 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. How about hours? by eddy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Success Stories

    "With PowerTOP, I managed to increase the battery life of my Panasonic R4 laptop from 4 to almost 7 hours" -- Keith Packard, Principal Engineer at Intel

    Guess you could accuse him of bias...

    --
    Belief is the currency of delusion.
    1. Re:How about hours? by eddy · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you just read the site (it's very small) you'll see that there are many no-obvious things you can detect with it. I personally do however consider it primarily a developer tool, but that might change. But even non-coding users can find out that the CDROM automounting polling is waking the CPU a lot, and disable that in battery mode, etc.

      --
      Belief is the currency of delusion.
  2. Re:How stable is CONFIG_NO_HZ? by Ant+P. · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm using NO_HZ on my P4 desktop. It was horrible in old patches, but the version in the mainline kernel (>= .20) is solid as a rock.

    I gave the powertop thing a try the other day. Seems the worst offender on my machine is MPD, even when it's not doing anything.