Linux Kernel Suffering Power Management Regression?

An anonymous reader writes "It appears that there's a big power management regression in the Linux kernel for the 2.6.38 and 2.6.39 development releases, including the kernel to ship with Ubuntu 11.04 next week. It's reportedly causing a 10~30% increase in power consumption on many laptop computers."

Comments

Re:Only Power Users will notice

[hairyfeet]

I'll probably get flamed for daring to say this, but what the hell: why in the world would you want to run Linux on a laptop? Now on a desktop, sure I can see that. There are many flavors of Linux that use less resources, and most importantly the parts are getting pretty bog standard now on desktops. I mean it is all Realtek or Intel or ATI or Nvidia chips, and that is pretty much it.

But laptops are where desktops were 20+ years ago, a big mess of proprietary suckage, where you can't even tell by looking at the model number, because you can get three identical model numbered Dell laptops and find three complete different chipsets, sometimes even completely different vendors! Hell it is a bug fucking mess, and the only reason Windows will run on the damned things is the fact the OEMs go out of their way to write drivers for it. With Linux unless you are buying enterprise gear all you are gonna get from them is the finger most times, or if you are lucky a single driver tied to a VERY specific kernel that if you are lucky and the moon is right will work kinda sorta but not quite.

So I don't see why Linux devs kill themselves to write and try to work on such a fucked up platform, especially if the OEMs are gonna make such a big mess of things with all the proprietary chipsets and funky firmware. Better to tell them to piss up a rope if they won't hand out the specs and code and just stick with ARM, where it looks like the future is gonna be anyway. So why do it? You are wasting very limited resources chasing a design that is here today, replaced by something completely different later today. Just seems like such a waste when the good money will be in embedded and clusters anyway.