What's eating the battery life of my laptop? Why isn't it many more hours? Which software component causes the most power to be burned? These are important questions without a good answer... until now.
The Linux 2.6.21 kernel introduces the so called tickless-idle feature. This feature allows the processor to be really idle for long periods of time, rather than having to wake up every millisecond for the timer tick. Current processors save a lot of power if they are idle for long periods, which translates into a longer battery life for your laptop, or a lower energy bill for your datacenter. However, a Linux system consists of more software than just the kernel, and there are many tunables involved. It's not easy to see what is going on, and as a result the behavior is sometimes far from optimal, and a lot of power is wasted.
Intel is proud to announce the PowerTOP tool (http://www.linuxpowertop.org), a program that collects the various pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. In addition, PowerTOP will provide an indication of which tunables and software components are the biggest offenders in slurping up your battery time. PowerTOP will update it's display frequently so that you can directly see the impact of any changes you are making.
A typical Linux distribution has many components that wake the processor up frequently for no good reason. In our testing with PowerTOP, we have seen many cases where with some simple fixes, the battery life of typical laptops was increased by one hour or more!
We are providing fixes for several of the issues we identified, and we encourage the Linux community to help us in this quest to get the maximum battery life out of your (hopefully Intel based) laptops. Try the PowerTOP tool, join the mailing list or the IRC channel and provide feedback, problem reports or fixes!
Website: http://www.linuxpowertop.org IRC: irc.oftc.net #powertop channel Mailing list: http://www.bughost.org/mailman/listinfo/power - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-acpi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
