Fwd: powertop on Inspiron 6400

[Török Edvin]

[forgot to hit reply-all]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Török Edvin <edwintorok at gmail.com>
Date: May 15, 2007 9:43 PM
Subject: Re: powertop on Inspiron 6400
To: Arjan van de Ven <arjan at linux.intel.com>


On 5/15/07, Arjan van de Ven <arjan at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> Török Edvin wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have tried powertop on a Dell  Inspiron 6400 (CPU: Core Duo).
> > After following some of the tips I got from 3.1h to 4h of battery. Great
> > tool!
>
> cool!
>
> >
> > The top wakeup cause is ide1:
> > 35.2% ( 9.0)    <interrupt> : ide1
> > 25.2% ( 6.6)    gnome-terminal : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
> > 10.3% ( 2.7)                   Xorg: do_setitimer (it_real_fn)
> > ...
> >
> > Wakeups-from-idle per second: 118.9
> > Power usage: 13.6W (3.9h left)
> >
> > I don't know why ide1 causes so many wakeups.
>
> maybe you have a cdrom connected there, and hal-daemon is polling your
> cdrom drive all the time?

Yep, stopping hald removes ide1 from the list

> ide1 is the 2nd controller (ide0 is the first one, normally the disk
> is on ide0 and the cdrom on ide1)
Oops, I didn't notice its ide_1_ till now. I know what it is, just
didn't notice, thanks for highlighting it.

>
>
> > The other "offender" is gnome-terminal, but its running nothing but
> > powertop itself.
>
> does your gnome-terminal have a blinking cursor?

Yes, disabling cursor makes gnome-terminal have 15.5% (1.7).

Still... I don't get it what numbers are added up to get
wakeups-from-idle per second.
PowerTOP shows 94.9, but the 'top causes' list shows
17.9% (2.0 ) Xorg
15.2% (1.7)
8.7% (1.0)
....

Are the numbers in the paranthesis the number of wakeups per sec of
that process?

Thanks,
Edwin