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Intel's PowerTOP Extends Linux Battery Life
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.
Of course this utility is very useful for developers and for Linux distributors.
For the average user it is a nightmare.
No wonder people say Linux has bad driver support. This is like running windows98 today and claiming that modern devices have no drivers.
Even RHEL and Debian stable, which make up a huge chunk of enterprise server linux in the USA use 2.6 kernels.
I think somebody missed the joke...
It could mean as much as an hour or two, depending. The less the CPU sleeps, the more power it consumes. The more the HDD gets accessed, the more power it consumes. ACPI doesn't buy you much if your CPU is constantly running at full clock and your HDD is always spinning.
My blog
C'mon what are we talking about here, a few minutes? AFAIK, better power savings comes through a good acpi config, which I don't see a whole lot of discussion on.
Do you even know what ACPI is? Have you read the link? (clearly not)
No matter how well your "acpi config" is done, if you've a process eating 100% of the cpu power all the time, your batteries will last less than a compuer with no ACPI that it's doing nothing.
IOW, even when your "acpi config" is good, you can save a lot of power. Not minutes, but even hours. How, is detailed in the article.
Wrong.
Can they fix the application? Yes. See the list of numerous patches to various "notorious" offenders.
Before you comment about patches being too difficult to apply - in nearly all cases those patches have been sent upstream and are being integrated into the app by the developers of that app. The end result is that while in the short term, PowerTOP benefits only power users who can patch and compile from source, it has enabled identification of offending sections of application code so that the application authors can fix it. (For example, the next release of Pidgin will come with numerous fixes for behavior found with PowerTOP.)
In short:
PowerTOP has almost no benefit for the "normal" user in the short term
PowerTOP has quite a lot of potential benefit for the "power" user
PowerTOP has the ability to enable application developers to make optimizations that help the "normal" users some time down the line (depending on application/distribution release cycles), thus PowerTOP has great benefit for "normal" users in the long term.
Can they stop the application? Usually not, but there are some notorious offenders that are "on by default" that most users don't benefit too much from, and would rather temporarily or permanently disable to increase battery life. (See Beagle for example).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Well if I find that turning off my music while working on a paper will give me another hour of battery time, it may well be worth it (particularly so if I don't have access to recharge). However, if I find it doesn't really eat that much power I'd like to keep rocking on. I don't ~need~ a lot of things as much as I need battery life in certain situations. I doubt I'm unique here.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire