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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
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.