reducing power usage of Fedora - how you can help!
Chris Jones
jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk
Fri Aug 17 18:20:28 UTC 2007
Hi,
Running my normal mix of KDE applications (kmail, konqueror,kopete) I get
Top causes for wakeups:
31.6% ( 85.1) <interrupt> : nvidia
24.2% ( 65.1) kopete : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
7.9% ( 21.3) <interrupt> : uhci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb2, eth0
7.4% ( 20.0) kicker : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
6.2% ( 16.8) X : do_setitimer (it_real_fn)
5.1% ( 13.6) gkrellm : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
4.2% ( 11.3) <interrupt> : libata
yes, ignore the nvidia one - Thats the binary driver....
kopete though is a problem. Some searching brought me to this ubuntu page
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kopete/+bug/127233
which says the problem is with "smooth scrolling" ... The fix, adding
SmoothScrolling=false
to my private /home/jonesc/.kde/share/config/kopeterc under [ContactList] does
indeed fix thigs, dropping the interupts down to a few per sec.
Chris
On Thursday 9 August 2007 5:06:58 pm Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Would you like your laptop battery to last longer? Would you like your
> servers to use less electricity? We certainly would. So we're investigating
> and fixing Fedora to use less juice.
>
> One of the biggest power problems is apps that wake up the CPU
> unnecessarily. With the tickless kernel for x86 (and soon x86_64),
> every time this happens it's a chance for power savings lost.
>
> HOW YOU CAN HELP
> ----------------
>
> We'd like to get as many reports of misbehaving apps as possible.
>
> 1) Install the 'powertop' package
>
> 2) Run it in a terminal window on a reasonably idle system with your
> normal combination of apps. (If you run it when you're actively
> compiling a kernel, watching a movie, or doing other CPU-intensive
> things, the results aren't as useful.)
>
> 3) Note the results. If you'd like to capture them for safe-keeping
> later, you can use the (Fedora-specific) '-d' option to dump them
> to stdout, rather than pasting from the running app.
>
> 4) Report the results. You can add reports here, on #fedora-devel,
> or to the upstream powertop community at power at bughost.org or
> #powertop on irc.oftc.net.
>
> *** Please use a service such as http://pastebin.ca/ rather than
> pasting powertop reports directly to an IRC channel. ***
>
> If you've got a specific app you know is misbehaving, please
> file a bug with the details, and set it to block the 'wakeup'
> bug in Fedora bugzilla. (bug number 204948.)
>
> Thanks for your assistance and help.
>
> Bill
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