reducing power usage of Fedora - how you can help!

Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
Thu Aug 9 16:06:58 UTC 2007


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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