load and power management

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 19:51 -0400, Peter A wrote:
> Does the load as display with uptime compensate for power management?
> I went through some of the kernel code the scheduler and the cpufreq
> kernel modules but didn't see anything.

Load average (as reported by uptime or ps) is a different animal from
CPU usage. LA is the weighted average of the number of processes waiting
for a CPU, i.e. those which could do something if they had a chance,
because they aren't waiting for I/O completion, user input or whatever.

It's possible to have high CPU usage with a low load average. A corner
case would be a compute-intensive application that's the only thing
running on the machine.

poc