Some questions and issues with current powertop

[Arjan van de Ven]

Thomas Müller wrote:
> 
> I have a few questions / issues:
> (I'm running an up-to-date version of powertop from the subversion 
> repository
> and AFAICT all relevant kernel options are enabled.)
> 
> 
> 2. The newest version of hal no longer kills the hald-addon-storage 
> process.
>    Instead it runs as
>    "hald-addon-storage: no polling on /dev/sr0 because it is explicitly 
> disabled".
>    I have now five of these processes running and they apparently wake 
> up often
>    enough to trigger powertop's suggestion to disable polling... but as 
> it's
>    already disabled, that suggestion is misleading.

arghhhh. At least killing it is still the right thing :)


> 
> 3. powertop suggests to enable SATA ALPM link power management, but it 
> doesn't work:
>  > # echo min_power > 
> /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
>  > # cat /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
>  > max_performance

Not all hardware actually supports the lower power states.. sadly the only way to find out is to try and see if it sticks.

> 
> 4. powertop -d reports that the CardReader is active 100.0% of the time 
> even though
>    every one of it's slots is empty.
>    I told powertop to enable USB autosuspend, but that doesn't seem to 
> make a difference.

For autosuspend to work the driver and the hardware both need to support it ;-(
For storage that... seems dicey..