PowerTOP tool released; time to fix the wasted laptop power on fedora?

[Peter Robinson]

> Hi,
>
> some of you already know that I've been working on getting Linux (and
> Fedora) to be a lot better about power usage on laptops by avoiding
> spurious wakeups and context switches and such (look at the "wakeup" bug
> in fedora bugzilla ;).
>
> As part of my job at Intel I've now released a user friendly tool that
> allows everyone that uses it to see what the biggest problems on their
> own laptop are... The results internally to Intel have been really good;
> several people gained an hour of battery just by using the tool and
> getting rid of (or fixing) 'broken' applications.
>
> PowerTOP can be downloaded from http://www.linuxpowertop.org

Very cool. Web site and mail archives are very slow though. Is there
some tracker bugs for some of the core issues. Playing with it you see
things like firefox right up the top of the list, along with a number
of in kernel stuff (usb, libata etc) which, at a guess, people would
already be aware of so there's probably already people working on it
for things like OLPC.

BTW, with the in-kernel cpuspeed stuff does the cpuspeed daemon still
need to be run as it seems to be right up there too?

Cheers,
Pete
(hoping one day to get the advertised 6 hours out of his extended battery)