On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 11:01:01PM -0700, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
I understand that you would prefer that we group applications into
"good" and "bad" categories, but then again, I suspect that most of us
understood that before you posted this message. Given your significant
and well-appreciated contributions to power efficiency over the past
several years, I must confess to be quite disappointed that you failed
to do more than to simply restate your preference.
However, your words below are much more to the point, so I will respond
to them.
I agree that much progress has been made over the past four years.
My laptop's battery life has increased substantially, with roughly half
of the increase due to software changes. Taken over all the laptops and
PCs out there, this indeed adds up to substantial and valuable savings.
So, yes, you have done quite well.
However, your reliance on application-by-application fixes, while good
up to a point, is worrisome longer term. The reason for my concern is
that computing history has not been kind to those who fail to vigorously
automate. The Android guys have offered up one way of automating power
efficiency. There might be better ways, but their approach does at
the very least deserve a fair hearing -- and no one who read the recent
LKML discussion of their approach could possibly mistake it for anything
resembling a fair hearing.
And yes, I do understand and appreciate your contributions in the form of
things like timer aggregation, which does automate the otherwise-tricky
task of coordinating power usage across unrelated applications, at
least in some important cases. But power efficiency will likely require
multiple approaches, especially if the Linux stack is to approach the
power efficiencies provided by dedicated devices.
Thanx, Paul
--
