| What's eating the battery life of my laptop? Why isn't it many more |
| hours? Which software component causes the most power to be burned? |
| These are important questions without a good answer... until now. |
| |
| The Linux 2.6.21 kernel introduces the so called tickless-idle |
| feature. This feature allows the processor to be really idle for long |
| periods of time, rather than having to wake up every millisecond for |
| the timer tick. Current processors save a lot of power if they are |
| idle for long periods, which translates into a longer battery life for |
| your laptop, or a lower energy bill for your datacenter. However, a |
| Linux system consists of more software than just the kernel, and there |
| are many tunables involved. It's not easy to see what is going on, and |
| as a result the behavior is sometimes far from optimal, and a lot of |
| power is wasted. |
| |
| Intel is proud to announce the PowerTOP tool |
| (http://www.linuxpowertop.org), a program that collects the various |
| pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how |
| well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. In addition, |
| PowerTOP will provide an indication of which tunables and software |
| components are the biggest offenders in slurping up your battery time. |
| PowerTOP will update it's display frequently so that you can directly |
| see the impact of any changes you are making. |
| |
| A typical Linux distribution has many components that wake the |
| processor up frequently for no good reason. In our testing with |
| PowerTOP, we have seen many cases where with some simple fixes, the |
| battery life of typical laptops was increased by one hour or more! |
| |
| We are providing fixes for several of the issues we identified, and we |
| encourage the Linux community to help us in this quest to get the |
| maximum battery life out of your (hopefully Intel based) laptops. Try |
| the PowerTOP tool, join the mailing list or the IRC channel and |
| provide feedback, problem reports or fixes! |
| |
| Website: http://www.linuxpowertop.org |
| IRC: irc.oftc.net #powertop channel |
| Mailing list: http://www.bughost.org/mailman/listinfo/power |
| Tags: intel, linux |
| |
| |
| |
| If you have bugreports or patches, I prefer that you use the mailing list |
| but you can email me directly at arjan@linux.intel.com. |
