How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux (O'Reilly) [LWN.net]

O'Reilly has put up an interview with Arjan van de Ven, available as (MP3) audio or a transcript. "A lot of users were helping because if you give people more battery life, that's what people care about a lot. Distributions also use it because they compete almost on battery life. They compete on usability and battery life is just part of usability; that's the thing that PowerTOP has done is put that more on the radar--that software matters for battery life."

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How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux (O'Reilly)

Posted Sep 30, 2008 2:58 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

The Debian epiphany-gecko still wakes some 200x/sec, and syndaemon (part of the X input synaptics module) hits ~50x/sec. There was a Debian bug entered against syndaemon, when last I checked, with a completely useless patch proposed.

Is Arjan just talking about upstream when he says it's all fixy now?

How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux (O'Reilly)

Posted Sep 30, 2008 3:13 UTC (Tue) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link]

all the software I encounter is fixed ;-)

Are the debian packages you mentioned still unfixed for their upcoming release? Is there a bugtracking number for them?

How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux (O'Reilly)

Posted Sep 30, 2008 5:04 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I don't find a bug entry for Debian epiphany-gecko, but the X synaptics package has #469166. These bugs appear poised to be released in Lenny. Have these been fixed in upstream?

Of course upstream Epiphany trunk is webkit-based, so the -gecko version is "legacy".

How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux (O'Reilly)

Posted Sep 30, 2008 7:24 UTC (Tue) by ErikA (guest, #53177) [Link]

You can hack around this by lowering the polling frequency without any noticeable drawbacks.

How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux (O'Reilly)

Posted Sep 30, 2008 13:33 UTC (Tue) by amimjf (guest, #506) [Link]

The Fedora metabug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=204948 still shows 'wakeup issues' not resolved.