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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.
The hardware that runs it does! Typical Intel, trying to shift the blame.
:)
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Guess you could accuse him of bias...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Most people i know still run 2.4.x and Slackware still ships with 2.4 as default.
Slackware users don't know people. Stop lying! It's just yourself who runs 2.4, right?
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?
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.
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.