hald causing stutters

[Rodd Clarkson]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 12:20 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 11:03 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > Rodd Clarkson <rodd <at> clarkson.id.au> writes:
> > > Watching my CPU use, I get a spike every 5 seconds (a cheap one thousand
> > > and one, two thousand and two quess).
> > > This is really quite annoying.  It's essentially a pause in your UI
> > > every 5 seconds or so, including music that's playing and the likes.
> > 
> > Oops. The new acpi check code polls every 5 seconds to support laptops that
> > don't give ACPI events. I'm not sure why the poll would cause such a massive
> > chunk of CPU. David,
> 
> the BIOS can take however long it wants to report certain things.
> Polling for battery can easily take a few dozen miliseconds. Asking more
> complex stuff can take longer.
> It's really better to never poll ;(
> (I realize the user experience isnt great there if the bios is crippled,
> but well.....)

I don't know what you would define as crippled, but I'm on a 4 day old
Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 2GHz processor, 768MB Ram.

Interestingly, and this may have nothing to do with it, but even though
I have a 780MB swap partition and fstab seems to have picked it up, it
doesn't seem to be 'enabled'.  I mention this because I've heard that
the kernel likes to have 'some' swap space.

fdisk /dev/hda shows:

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1           6       48163+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/hda2               7         372     2939895    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3             373         715     2755147+  db  CP/M / CTOS / ...
/dev/hda4             716        7296    52861882+   5  Extended
/dev/hda5   *         716         725       80293+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6             726        1745     8193118+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7            1746        1843      787153+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda8            1844        5158    26627706   83  Linux

less /etc/fstab shows:

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
LABEL=/home             /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
LABEL=SWAP-hda7         swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

less /proc/meminfo shows

MemTotal:       774344 kB
MemFree:         11500 kB
Buffers:         26664 kB
Cached:         255784 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         381484 kB
Inactive:       166756 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       774344 kB
LowFree:         11500 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:               0 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:         324336 kB
Slab:           201824 kB
CommitLimit:    387172 kB
Committed_AS:   998888 kB
PageTables:       4052 kB
VmallocTotal:   245752 kB
VmallocUsed:      3332 kB
VmallocChunk:   242204 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB