battery app using much cpu

[George J Karabin]

On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 08:58, Jared Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 01:23, Warren Togami wrote:
> > Known bug...
> [snip]
> > I suspect Gnome's battery applet may be querying the battery info too 
> > often.  On my laptop with 2.4 or 2.6 kernel with ACPI enabled, Gnome's 
> > battery applet causes constant 15-20% CPU usage with two noticable 
> > hiccups per second where the mouse jumps because of loss of interactivity.
> > 
> > Some guy in IRC said he knew of a patch to fix that, but I don't 
> > remember the details.
> 
> For what it's worth, I'm seeing something similar.  When I use ACPI on
> my Dell Inspiron 8200, the CPU usage spikes up to 80-90% every couple of
> seconds.  And while it makes pretty little lines on the CPU portion of
> the System Monitor applet, it's really annoying...
> 

This could be a BIOS issue. Lots of posts on linux-kernel talking about
something like what you're each reporting. Here's the most useful
example:

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0202.2/0056.html

More recent ones:

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0209.3/0369.html
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2003-24/0220.html
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0301.1/2112.html

I never noticed a cpu spike on my C610, nor a constant loading - that
might be a sign you're seeing something different. But if you have some
background job running periodically, it could be getting stalled by the
BIOS call, and that could cause your periodic cpu spike.

- George