2.6.24 - maaaassive amount of wakeups + can't get into c3

[Donnie Berkholz]

On 20:09 Tue 25 Mar     , Sean McNamara wrote:
> But still.... 25 W on my system is only barely attainable on full screen 
> bright, disk grinding as hard as it can, with both cores maxed out. It 
> might be that 25W is more normal for the larger T61.

My T61 started around 21-22W under a typical workload before I did some 
optimizing. I disabled kernel module autoloading (pcmcia, usb, 
bluetooth, mmc, firewire), enabled cpufreq, and did the other powertop 
suggestions. I finally got screen brightness and the other hotkeys 
working with a magical boot-time kernel parameter:

  acpi_osi="Windows 2000"

Now I'm regularly around 16-17W / 180-190 wakeups/sec. With effort 
(unloading sound and wireless modules, turning screen brightness way 
down) and a completely idle system, I can get around 13.5W.

The three main remaining offenders are split roughly equally between 
firefox (2.0.0.12), sound/wireless interrupts, and extra timer 
interrupts. Increasing my router's beacon time to 1000ms didn't appear 
to help a whole lot, unfortunately. The mixer applet's fairly high up, 
too.

One weird thing: even when unused, the sound modules resulted in many 
interrupts anytime after playing music. If I unload and reload them, 
those go away.

Thanks,
Donnie