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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