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Ubuntu's Power Consumption Tested
RedDragon writes "Ubuntu 7.10 is due out on Thursday, October 18, and in addition to desktop 3D effects, GNOME 2.20, and other features is the use of the Linux 2.6.22 kernel with the tick-less (CONFIG_NO_HZ) kernel feature. But does this mean enhanced power savings when compared to past Ubuntu releases? Phoronix tested Ubuntu power consumption looking back 2-1/2 years at the six Ubuntu releases from Ubuntu 5.04 to the yet-to-be-released Ubuntu 7.10. Testing was done when the system was idling and then under load, and when the Lenovo notebook was powered via the battery and then again with the AC adapter. The Pentium M CPU temperature was also monitored. While Ubuntu 7.10 does include the tick-less kernel feature, more daemons and processes running by default on these modern Ubuntu releases is actually causing an increase in power consumption."
I'm confused - don't computers now use more power then they used to? Because of new software and being able to do more powerful things?
I mean - Vista will use more power than Windows XP, OS X will use more power than Mac OS 9.
Or is there a fundamental flaw in my logic that I'm missing here?
As cool as these Compiz effects are, they should not be forced upon everyone, just made very easy for people to obtain.
Plus, this version never actually booted up because it didn't like my Broadcom 4318.
I'd be more interested in seeing how Ubuntu's power consumption stacks up against Windows and MacOS...
Although each newer system does more ... they've also improved the code so that it does so more efficiently. Or in the case of the tick-less kernel, other code has changed.
... but still uses more power than even earlier releases did.
So, the question is: Do the improvements offset the additional features.
The answer is: Yes, to a degree. 7.10beta runs cooler and more efficiently than 7.04
So the next question is: How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them and how much of a power savings will you see then?
1. Run the particular distro.
2. Make sure the power cord is long and in the open.
3. Allow a penguin to chew through the cord.
4. Measure the distance the penguin flies after chewing into the cord. This will give you some idea of the power usage.
5. Well, don't let that penguin go to waste! BBQ and teriyaki are great ways to make penguin. Personally, I prefer General Tso's Penguin myself.
TFA doesn't specify error bars, which of course makes the results somewhat dubious. They list numbers to two decimal place accuracy (e.g. 48.00), but since all the numbers end in .00, I'm guessing those decimal places are not significant. In other words, the number are only good to within +/- 1 or +/- 2 or something like that. Considering that they are trying to compare numbers that are quite similar (27 to 33), their conclusions may not be reliable.
When comparing numbers, an estimate of the error is crucial. If the difference between two measurements is smaller than the error, then you cannot meaningfully say they are different.
Does anyone know if Ubuntu actually have machines hooked up to measure this kind of thing in house, looking for regressions in power usage? I gather the OLPC project has thing kind of thing as part of their build system (driven off the code repository), but they are naturally particularly concerned about battery life.
I didn't realize that the tick-less task manager was supposed to save power. Maybe that could be explained as I've never read anything about it.
very misleading healine. I RTFA and if you look at the nice graph, it actually shows a decrease in power usage since feisty and just about what the prior versions were. AC power consumption idling went from 31 to 29 from feisty to gutsy. while loaded, it went down slightly from 51 [feisty] to 50 [gutsy] the only thing that gutsy was higher in was battery discharge rate idle- it was at 22.26 while feisty was at 21.16. while loaded on battery it went down from 33.51 to 32.21 from feisty to gutsy.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
toast, still not free
-Reid
"more daemons and processes running by default on these modern Ubuntu releases is actually causing an increase in power consumption."
Ya think?
I just install OpenSuse 10.3 on a tower type and a laptop.
The first thing I do is go in and disable a whole slew of bullshit that's enabled by default.
I LOVE Linux but the trend lately has been to BLOAT it up like a new eMachine that's preloaded with 40gigs of bullshit.
What ever happened to minimal? When I installed Suse 9.3 on my Athlon 64 w/1g ram, it ran like a cat with it's ass on fire.
SAME hardware with OpenSuse 10.2 was abysmal. It was sooooo bad that I was just about to give up on it then 10.3 came out.
It's a slight improvement but, damn! They are developing all the new distros with the assumption that everyone is going to run out and buy all new shit. Shades of M$, dare I say??
For the longest time Linux captured and held my heart because it would run so fast on the oldest, worst case hardware.
No more. Wanna run the latest distro? Better put some $$$ back for all new hardware...
Bloat = power drain.
How about getting back to basics and quit focusing on the bling-bling. Linux is NOT windows and it never should be. Quit trying to make it look and act like windows. Quit trying to make it run windows crap. Be happy that it's not windows. I do not want windows compatibility. At all. Ever.
Kill the bloat and pork and watch power consumption go down. Not to mention the old PC's being tossed out into the environment.
Actually, I think it is rather impressive that 7.10 (which has eye candy on by default) has slightly less power consumption than 7.04 (no eye candy by default).
In other words, they increased features while decreasing (generally) power consumption. While it seems to be only about 1 or 2 watts lower (excepting battery idle where it is slightly higher), we are only talking 3-5 watts difference over 2.5 years of updates. In fact, it went down 4 watts using ac idle compared to 5.04, which I am sure had far fewer daemons/features.
Some of this may be better code etc. However, I think we should be giving the people who have been doing the coding here major Kudos for doing getting the most out of our computers (whereas MS wants us to quadruple our ram to use eye candy, they are doing it with the same amount of ram standard 4 years ago on a desktop, and keeping power down). I don't even want to think of what Vista must use in power.
Laptop users may want to stick with 32-bit Ubuntu, since the CONFIG_NO_HZ (tickless kernel) option isn't available in 64-bit kernels yet.
If you're feeling adventurous, patches here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tglx/hrtimers/
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I was pretty amazed with the beta of Ubuntu 7.10. I even installed it on my system, but after about 30min-1 hour of use, trackerd was consistently keeping my CPU usage up at least 30%. That's not the fault of the Ubuntu team, as they did not write trackerd, but they really do need to be careful about the daemons that they allow to run in the background on a default installation. I don't know what it is there for, but according to this description, it doesn't sound like it is something that a vanilla, desktop installation would want on there. The approach to background processes should be the KISS. On a vanilla desktop installation, only the barest set of such thing should be on there.
There are way too many daemons running on modern Linux systems; it really shouldn't require separate processes for I/O, settings, hardware configuration, every little panel thingy, etc.
Usually, aren't the only people that care people running servers? Laptops hardly qualify. I only glanced at the article, but I'm willing to bet that they couldn't be bothered to test each operating system repeatedly and scientifically. I'm willing to bet that if they had the difference would have been statistically negligible. A few seconds of battery life isn't much to write home about, unless your running back to it because you forgot to save something...
lol: You see no door there!
I won't flame you. Just disagree. Ok, maybe flame a little then:
Because your post is simply a not-so-small pile of bullshit, which *maybe* was even only part true a couple of years ago.
And..eeh.. Isn't the fact that you have to buy special Sun hardware to get something that just works with Solaris kind of crappy?
Why not, in that case, buy hardware that you know are extremely compatible with your preferred linux distro? Or a mac?
Or what? Is your point that I can get insanely good stuff by paying an far more than-equally-insane amount of money?
No shit, sherlock.
Baboons are cute.
Clearly they only ran the experiment once with each setup, hence no estimate of the variance or error can be made. The results tell us nothing - without significance tests the article is, while interesting, nothing more than conjecture.
I'm shocked that slashdot has only rated the parent as "2, insightful". This point is at least as important as whether they used the same hardware for each test, which programs were used for the load test, and whether or not the writer was employed by Microsoft.
Shame on you moderators.
For an actual linux story, this is what i read for, not the 2000 stories about the iphone, or how bill gates cant get into nigeria, more of these stories please!
One could roughly estimate the variance by looking at the meter fluctuations while taking the reading, or checking the design accuracy of the meter in the manufacturer's data sheet. You need some kind of estimate if you are going to draw any conclusions (which the authors of TFA were attempting to do).
I really wish they put Ubuntu next to latest XP, latest Vista and latest OSX (ok I guess they could wait few days for Leopard to get out).
As an XP user, two Ubuntu tests don't give me a clear picture of how this relates to the OS I use right now. I do suspect Ubuntu will have lower power consumption than XP, and for Vista the margin will be pretty wide.
But how much exactly..?
Once beagle is disabled in opensuse the system runs much more smoothly
Linux applications have undergone a Progression in order to try and stay on par with Windows and OSX. To offer greater services and compatibility than Windows can, Linux is trying to compete with applications that have a very small yet main stream arch of compatibility. Putting them at an advantage. They use less electricity because they have less stuff to run because they are FAR less compatible.
That being said, there is something to be said about using better discipline in writing Linux applications. That would help. But as with ACPI, Windows has an advantage. Lets see what we can do to take that advantage away. Remember what we are fighting for.
Really? I'm not aware of this.
I can see a danger that Ubuntu is training a generation of Linux users who neither know nor care what root is, and just type their password into whatever dialog box asks for it - that's setting us up for a Windows-style explosion of malware - but bugs inherent to sudo? Please explain, because that's a major issue if so.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There must be something very wrong with tested system or Ubuntu configuration. 30 watts idle consumption is very, very wrong. My Thinkpad z61t idles at 13-14W with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. I expect lower value after upgrading to 7.10. And maybe even lower when I roll my own latest kernel with patches from lesswatts.org. I would be happy to go to 10W on idle, it would match advertised 6.25 hr worktime with 65Wh battery I have.
:wq
The main problem with power consumption is a "We no longer care about CPU cycles" attitude among many programmers, especially among the KDE and Gnome crowd. Why is there a daemon for every little thing programs could formerly handle by themselves or through libraries?
Like gconfd for parsing configs and watching them for changes. Or dbus, as if there were no othere proven methods for IPC, that don't require another daemon idling around and waking up every other millisecond eating away battery life. Or just log out from a KDE session and watch those 10 or so beauties like dcopserver idling aroud, eating memory. And does anybody even know what something like bonobo-activation-daemon does?
The laziness of application programmers has gone much to far, instead of using methods that are provided by the operating system and just require finding them there is a load of new, redundant mechanisms mostly implemented by new daemons. Every programmer introducing some new battery-eater should be required to justify this additional power by more than just "its easier this way", "windows also has some registry-parsing daemon" or "but I don't like parsing sysfs myself".
NO_HZ is nice, but only curing the symptoms of a larger problem: daemon-bloat! Get rid of them and you will see some real improvements.
Given that the stock Ubuntu (if you don't include "restricted drivers") comes with FULL source code, yes, all of them.
On a more realistic note, most people do need restricted drivers, and most people don't want to mess around with source code. But it's based on Debian, which means, for the most part, you can completely remove services you don't need, point and click, provided you know what they are.
Then again, I actually do want most of these services -- for example, the parts that make everything plug'n'play, from USB storage to wireless, even the CD "autorun" feature of Windows if you really want it. Most users won't have to think about "mounting" any more than they do on Windows, and somewhat more than they might on OS X, and that's a good thing.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There are times I would agree with you here, and it probably depends very heavily on how hot your graphics hardware is. But as far as productivity goes, only certain effects would actually be advantageous, for instance the expose-like function is really nice if you have a lot going on, and the cube just makes me more likely to use multiple desktops in a more effective way because the paradigm makes more sense to me. but shadows, window pop-in and pop-out effects, wobble, even transparency, are only going to slow you down if anything. I guess my point is, it's all in what you have enabled. try tuning your effects to what will actually help productivity, and see if you don't like it better.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
I haven't tried Gutsy, but which applets are loaded by default? For 7.04, I don't think many were loaded at all.
I'm running Ubuntu gutsy, and the T60p out of the box suspended fine. If I allow the binary ATI drivers onto my box, suspend breaks because their driver has a bug with the SLUB allocator, preventing sleep.
The other frustration is that I'm pretty much stuck using ndiswrapper, the madwifi driver is way too flaky on this laptop.
If I had a choice of equipment, would've gone with an nVidia graphics and Intel wireless, but oh well.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm having trouble believing that their measurements are significant. We're talking differences of a few watts out of about 30 watts at idle and about 50 watts at load, and their precision is in single watts with no error bars.
.00 everywhere made me think that they didn't do this.
My laptop's battery drain rate at idle (with wireless etc off) is 11.5 +- 1.5 watts according to PowerTOP, and if you toss in a power brick it's gonna be even more variable (particularly because Lenovo's power bricks suck the big one). Percentage-wise, my laptop's power consumption varies from minute to minute by more than Phoronix' measurements, depending on whether the hard drive is spinning, how many redraws it had to do, and how many interrupts it had to service. With wireless on, it would also vary by how many packets it sends and receives.
You could make this difference significant: turn off networking or get on a private subnet, wait a half-hour for background stuff to complete, and average over a period of at least another hour. But their
Also, you have to normalize for CPU frequency scaling: different versions of Ubuntu probably scale the CPU to different speeds under battery+load, meaning that some would take longer and use less power (but not necessarily less energy: power = energy / time).
Of course, Ubuntu 7.10 does use more power than previous versions. It has trackerd enabled by default, which inconsiderately re-indexes your hard drive even when you're running on battery; that has to cost a couple watts when it's running. It also has compiz on by default, which wakes up the CPU and graphics card every 20ms in order to sync to the vblank; that probably costs a half-watt or so.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Cite?
It's Windows. And it empowers me just fine. I mean, I get stuff done just fine. Like hundreds of millions of other people. You know?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
- Fast User Switcher
- Deskbar
- Volume Control, and
- Clock
The only new one in gutsy is the fast user switcher, which I can't imagine uses much of anything at all. The notification area has a couple of daemons showing, though:- Network Manager and
- Update Notifier
I don't see the major difference from Feisty. Maybe that's just mePut identity in the browser.
It's an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB OEM RAM, 120GB SATA Hard drive, and an Nvidia FX 5200 video card (I think)
/proc/meminfo /proc/cpuinfo
/dev/hda1 3.8G 2.3G 1.3G 64% / /var/run /var/lock /proc/bus/usb /dev /dev/shm /lib/modules/2.6.20-16-386/volatile
That's not even close to the very machine whose browser I'm using right now, and that I use every single day when I come back home. I'm running every kubuntu version since edgy on this machine, each one making it faster and smoother to use, I'm currently on Feisty because the Gutsy driver for my wireless card is acting a little funky, but I tested it and it runs even better and faster. (Summary of the info below: Pentium Celeron 850 MHz, 256MB RAM, 4GB HD No tricks involved, vanilla ubuntu as it comes, with KDE and everything, even mplayer plays movies smootly.
fernando@OldMachine:~$ uname -r
2.6.20-16-386
fernando@OldMachine:~$ cat
MemTotal: 256248 kB
MemFree: 3316 kB
Buffers: 980 kB
Cached: 109088 kB
SwapCached: 17396 kB
Active: 195300 kB
Inactive: 35624 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 256248 kB
LowFree: 3316 kB
SwapTotal: 240932 kB
SwapFree: 125312 kB
Dirty: 1016 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 120640 kB
Mapped: 68164 kB
Slab: 14852 kB
SReclaimable: 4464 kB
SUnreclaim: 10388 kB
PageTables: 2956 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 369056 kB
Committed_AS: 618316 kB
VmallocTotal: 770040 kB
VmallocUsed: 3672 kB
VmallocChunk: 766132 kB
fernando@OldMachine:~$ cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel / cpu family : 6 / model : 8 / model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 10 / cpu MHz : 851.568 / cache size : 128 KB / fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no / f00f_bug : no / coma_bug : no / fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes / cpuid level : 2 / wp : yes / flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 1704.74 / clflush size : 32 /
fernando@OldMachine:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
varrun 126M 104K 126M 1%
varlock 126M 0 126M 0%
procbususb 126M 112K 126M 1%
udev 126M 112K 126M 1%
devshm 126M 0 126M 0%
lrm 126M 34M 92M 27%
(Damn lameness filter, let it pass, don't block my post, take some rest. I wish I was smart to make a haiku, in Soviet Russia, posts block you.)
From Peter Gutmann's excellent "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection". This paper should be required reading for anyone considering purchasing a Vista PC for ANY use.
Tell you what - ship me an older thinkpad and I will tell you. Let me give you some advice, spelling windows as Windoze make you look like an immature jackass.
From Wikipedia Criticism of Peter Gutmann's analysis of Vista DRM Peter Gutmann's Vista criticism has come under fire after his speech at the USENIX Security Symposium in August 2007.[3] from George Ou (ZDNet) who challenged Peter Gutmann's claims that Vista Content Protection causes so much additional CPU utilization that it increases power consumption and causes global warming.[4] Gutmann made many of the basic assertions in his paper on Vista content protection but made the more extreme statements at Usenix Boston 2007 as reported by PCWorld.[3] Ou cited data that showed no measurable power differences between 5% and 15% CPU utilization on an Intel E6600 dual-core processor and then cited HD playback performance data from AnandTech which indicated less than 7% total CPU consumption during 1080p VC-1 encoded video playback.[5] Ed Bott challenged some of Peter Gutmann's other claims.[6] Ken Fisher challenged Gutmann's claim that Vista content protection extended beyond commercial content in to user generated content.[7] Gutmann admittedly doesn't run Windows Vista and stated in his paper: "Can others confirm this? I don't run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft's claims that the content protection doesn't interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present". This statement has recently been removed from Gutmann's website but an older PDF version the paper with that statement can be found here. George Ou later reported that Gutmann relied on web forum postings for several of his key assertions such as excessive CPU and memory consumption in Vista's Media Foundation Protected Pipeline (mfpmp.exe) and AudioDG (Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation) process. Ou's tests showed that the web forum data Gutmann relied on were not repeatable. Furthermore, CPU utilization was wrongly attributed to mfpmp.exe when in fact it was actually accounting for all the CPU consumption in mfpmp.exe and Windows Media Player 11 combined.
Sorry for the formating on the above post.
Peter Gutmann's Vista criticism has come under fire after his speech at the USENIX Security Symposium in August 2007.[3] from George Ou (ZDNet) who challenged Peter Gutmann's claims that Vista Content Protection causes so much additional CPU utilization that it increases power consumption and causes global warming.[4] Gutmann made many of the basic assertions in his paper on Vista content protection but made the more extreme statements at Usenix Boston 2007 as reported by PCWorld.[3] Ou cited data that showed no measurable power differences between 5% and 15% CPU utilization on an Intel E6600 dual-core processor and then cited HD playback performance data from AnandTech which indicated less than 7% total CPU consumption during 1080p VC-1 encoded video playback.[5] Ed Bott challenged some of Peter Gutmann's other claims.[6] Ken Fisher challenged Gutmann's claim that Vista content protection extended beyond commercial content in to user generated content.[7]
Gutmann admittedly doesn't run Windows Vista and stated in his paper: "Can others confirm this? I don't run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft's claims that the content protection doesn't interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present". This statement has recently been removed from Gutmann's website but an older PDF version the paper with that statement can be found here.
George Ou later reported that Gutmann relied on web forum postings for several of his key assertions such as excessive CPU and memory consumption in Vista's Media Foundation Protected Pipeline (mfpmp.exe) and AudioDG (Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation) process. Ou's tests showed that the web forum data Gutmann relied on were not repeatable. Furthermore, CPU utilization was wrongly attributed to mfpmp.exe when in fact it was actually accounting for all the CPU consumption in mfpmp.exe and Windows Media Player 11 combined.
On my Dell 1420N (2GHz Core 2 Duo on the Santa Rosa chipset) with an up-to-date Gutsy, a few minutes after logging in to GNOME powertop reports 190 wakeups from idle per second and a power usage of 12.6W. After following all of powertop's recommendations (including disabling bluetooth and reducing wifi power), wakeups and power usage went down to 58 and 11.4W respectively.
Goddamned, just shut up. You're bringing the level of discussion here to sub-kindergarten levels, seriously.
Comment of the year
Try again.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Of all the stupid stories on the front page of "News for Nerds, things that matter only to really, really anally retarded linux dorks" this one takes the cake.
Power consumption....Power Consumption! I believe a lot of you have been stuck in your server rooms to long.
oh yeah I like the "I want to see it compared to Windows and OSX" guy post also. I mean, that's guaranteed to generate posts.
Grow up. Do you really think I'm going to base any business decision based on a third rate website that fell out of the loop five years ago? No, I'm going to test, and test, and test. Then I'm going to make the sales guy take me to lunch. I'm a cheap date so even Denny's would be fine. Then I'm going to grill him until his eyes go blank and he starts to drool. Then I'll ask to talk to an engineer.
Its like the OpenOffice posts. Just because SLASHDOT says its great, that means nothing. Good luck fan boys.
Isn't xubuntu supposed to be bare and minimal? They put out a distro of ubuntu that's minimalistic already. If you don't want all the new features (I'm not upgrading just yet, everything works and I haven't had to fark with it in months) then don't upgrade or just install xubuntu or install ubuntu and turn all the extras off.
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
As opposed to "you do know" which is a perfectly un-annoying phrase.
(but thanks for the counterpoint all the same)
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Doesn't this still result in battery life tests being null and void, for the most part? The only thing you can say is that if the battery life is just as long or longer than it was 2.5 years ago, that there have been significant improvements in efficiency. Otherwise, wouldn't the battery's storage capacity shrink over the last two and a half years have an adverse effect on battery life?
Similar setup here, but running quite tolerably on a 1GHz C7, 1GB RAM, 150G SATA, dual 1680x1050 monitors off a PNY GeForce FX 5200 (I don't do any 3d, though). For my money, Gentoo is far preferable to Xubuntu, which always seems to have some issue for me. Couple of gotchas:
1) With that little horsepower, you want emerge to get all of it. You have two options: Either nice -n19 emerge (which takes forEVER, but you can theoretically multitask), or start the emerge, and leave the box alone for about a day.
2) Build the vast majority of what you want at once. If you break up the emerge into chunks, then you'll be sitting around monitoring chunkN so you can start chunkN+1, and it's like watching water boil. You'll miss some packages, but compiling a few won't drive you too nuts. For the intial compile, just accept the fact that emerge needs all the horsepower it can get.
3) Use openoffice-bin. For me, oo.o took about 5-6 hours to compile, and you'll re-incur that cost every time it upgrades. I don't use it that often, so I probably would have spent more time compiling it than actually using it. I have difficulty imagining there's THAT big a difference between oo-bin and compiled oo.
4) After you're done, you don't really need to be that lightweight. I happen to like Amarok, so I use it rather than audacious or any of the lighter weight mp3 players. (Having said that, you probably don't want Amarok to rescan your collection automatically. It's a bit of a beast.)
AFAIC, xfce is in just about the right spot. Pretty and configurable enough to get it to do what you want, but without the bloat and flashiness of kde or gnome. I don't know whether I'd give it to my parents, but it works really well for me.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
First, I'll let Gutmann comment on his use of various OSes:
As far as George Ou and Ed Bott are concerned, again I'll let Gutmann himself address this. Key quotes below:
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
So... in [3], what Ou is saying is that even if Vista doesn't use more "power", it's still using 3x the CPU resources to do something that actively detracts from a consumer's options in using media? And this is somehow... good for the consumer, wasting resources without giving the owner of the machine a choice in the matter? Just because it doesn't use more power from 5-15% doesn't mean that the difference between 50% and 60% utilization won't change the wattage draw. I think y'all got something a little backwards, especially when you cherry-pick your tests.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
It was checked into the 2.6.24 GIT tree last week, and I built a generic K8 kernel with NO_HZ. I booted it, and PowerTop says that laptop is getting about 50 timer ticks per second now (vs 260/second before). FWIW that's with Feisty ...
The biggest problem there is the audio mixer, which causes more most of those ticks. That's userspace code, which Ubuntu can and should be power-tuning. It's not like PowerTop isn't available, or anything like that!
Feel free to use MINIX or an old version of Linux with just plain X. But the idea that Linus should not be what the rest of us want and need is nonsense. Go do your thing in your corner, but don't expect the rest of the world to follow you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do you have a similar five click method to eliminate DRM from checking your permissions 30 times a second while playing "premium" sound files?
By not having any "premium" DRM encumbered sound files on the computer?
That would be your solution on Linux right? Since it can't play them anyway.
Guess what, not using them works on Vista too.
Wait you mean having tons of applications open on four separate desktops on different sides of a 3d cube with reflection takes more computer power? YOU'RE KIDDING!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
You must be new here.. it is a single account, but it has many users.
which is totally what she said
Can't you turn off the bits you don't want? IF not, try downloading Beryl. It is the same thing basically, but has more options than really needed. So you can turn off just about anything.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
The only news I'll ever find worth publishing about Linux and power saving is, WHEN WILL SPEEDSTEP WORK? I mean, work as in "it works". Install, reboot, find the CPU fan off and your p4D or c2d running at 200MHz.
Same thing for hardware sensors.
Linux will be on MY desktop the very day THOSE work.
Getting that to work is the last painful Linux experience. (Well, that, and wireless. But WiFi just plain sucks on every platform as of now. Nothing works, except when the windows drivers contain all the logic and the firmware AND are programmed well enough to JUST WORK.)
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Windoze might spare me some power use but it will never empower anyone.
/.
If you need a computer to 'empower' you then you have problems that can't be resolved on
I hope that folks can/will know to use the boot-up manager (BUM) to disable many of the services that come on by default. Ubuntu, I know, is trying to be useful and all things to all people but they do start too many services at load time.
That's allowing the perfect to interfere with the good. Just because you aren't going to do a full variance study doesn't mean you can't eyeball the variation in the meter while doing the measurement and tell us what you think the spread is.
How does that differ from Fedora, which also throws up a dialog box whenever I install/update software?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Personalization (inc. themes and desktop effects) are per-user settings, so don't need privilege authorization.
But then, from your post, I'm guessing your sum knowledge of the Principle of Least Privilege and the idea of LUA accounts is derived from Apple advertisments. May I recommend Google?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Who said I thought it was the same person? Just refering to a Troll who needed to explain Trolling
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
This was not off topic, it is just showing how retarded the comparison is
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
power...
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
The testing they've done doesn't seem to be useful for determining the power consumption of the system for one simple reason: If you run a program designed to max the CPU throughput, the CPU will use a lot of power. To test actual power usage you'd need to run a particular task, accomplished in a particular time, and then see how much power the machine uses.
Say, you want to compile a small program (if it runs quickly, the cpu will get to rest sooner), perform a list of tasks in gmail (where the CPU can be throttled to save power), etc.
Logi - I can do anything, but not everything.
Got anything relevant to add, Twitter, or did you just want to throw a tantrum?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I have a macbook (yes I typed that right) and I upgraded to 7.10 a few days agi. If I can say anything about the Os it gives me 1 and a half hours tops of batterylife. I understand that there have been various updates to apps and the kernel, but I think if u get sufficient power management out of 7.04 then stay with it.
Windows on a mac is Windows under Supervision. - Frank Soltis(Chief Scientist/Designer of AS400)