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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.
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.
My guess is where this kind of thing would make a dollars/cents difference is in the NOC. But this kind of detail isn't very sexy or very high on most NOC operators radar.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Sure, but I was thinking more like "I went with NO_HZ and then apparently the initialization code for my controller freaked out and ate my RAID-set" type problems, not "The SSH daemon didn't start."
Belief is the currency of delusion.
That depends. Laptops are saving power because presumably they're idle most of the time and this program can tell you which processes behave badly while "idle" (by, say, polling the HDD for no good reason). On a server presumably your machine spends very little time idle (since you're serving stuff), so there isn't much opportunity for power savings from an application like this.
I read the internet for the articles.
I have just tried the thing. I achieved less than 20 wakeups per second when my KDE desktop is idle, but learned a few things on the way. For example, by using a USB mouse instead of the laptop touchpad I am unable to reach state C3. It's reached when I unplug the mouse. I suppose I'll have to put up with it, because I can't stand the touchpad. On the other hand, I used to have KMail opened in a second virtual desktop to check for mail every 60 seconds, but I discovered that the bastard was waking up twice a second for no apparent reason, so I have started to use Korn (the mail check systray thingy). There are still some applications that wake up for no reason apparently. For example, why does klipper wake up once per second? And the same goes for kwrapper. I don't even know what that is. Can somebody explain in detail? Google isn't very specific about it.
:P
But yes, the application is very interesting. Sorry, Intel, my laptop has an AMD processor. The next one will be Intel, with an Intel graphics card and an Intel wireless card. I promise.
Our FreeBSD servers auto-throttle their CPU speeds down when idle. The average runtime on our monitored UPS has gone from 60 to 75 minutes. Even if electricity were free, and even if air conditioners were free, and even if we didn't care about wasting energy for no good reason, that still means we have 15 more minutes to get the generator up and running in the event of a long power outage.
Maybe that's not much to you, but it's pretty darn nice for us.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
A KDE developer used it and made a patch for arts on his blog. I look forward to what other developers find and fix.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?