powertop output on SMP

[Arjan van de Ven]

Alan Jenkins wrote:
>  >From the FAQ:
> 
>     Q. What exactly is the number in parentheses in "39.4% (115.6) foo:
>     bar"?
>     A. It's the number of wakeups per second and per CPU core.
> 
> I think this is potentially a problem.  If you send someone powertop -d 
> output e.g. as a bug report, the output doesn't say how many cores you 
> have, and for the purposes of fixing software the relevant figure is 
> usually the *overall* number of wakeups per second.
> 
> I wouldn't like to suggest changing the displayed units, and 
> wakeups/core are probably more relevant to the individual.  But I think 
> it might be worth adding "cores:" to the summary line, so you can 
> multiply the per-core figures in an arbitrary dump.

ok yes you have a point; it kinda is a hard question because it 
depends on what you want to see: do you want to see how much your cpu 
is woken up, or do you want to see how a specific application is 
behaving? The answer to that question is basically the difference 
between showing per cpu or showing total wakeups... ;-(

The total wakeups/sec really ought to be per cpu, but I'll think about 
a way to make the per-app wakeups not per cpu without confusing people 
(because if the nr 1 app shows a wakeup count bigger than the total 
wakes... I get bugreports ;)