login
Search
On Fri, Aug 06, 2010 at 06:00:34PM -0700, david@lang.hm wrote:Most other devices use a lot more power at idle; in some cases it's because the hardware just isn't as power optimized (why bother, when you have 94,000 mWh of power at your disposal with a 6 cell laptop battery, as opposed to the 800-1000 mWh that you might have on a cell phone battery). In other cases, it's because the kernel and the low-level software stack (never mind the applications) are waking up the CPU too darned often --- in other words, idle simply isn't idle enough. So you may want to consider whether part of the problem is that general purpose Linux systems need a radical redesign to get power utilization down to those sorts of levels --- where the CPU might only be waking up once every half-hour or so, and then only do actual useful work. Can you get there by assuming that every single application is competently written? In an idle approach, you have to. That way lies Maemo, where installing just one bad application will cut your battery life time by a factor of 2-3. You could try stopping processes by using kill -STOP, but this at that point, you've moved into Android strategy of "suspend". And the only question is what is the most efficient way to allow the system to run when there is true work that needs to be done, and how to avoid deadlocks by stopping processes that might be holding user space locks --- and to administer when and how to suspend the processes. Sure, you could do someting amazing complicated using cgroups, and user space processes that have to wake up the CPU every 30 seconds to see if it's safe to suspend the system --- but why not just use the system which is being used by 200,000 new phones every day? It's simple and it works. And unlike Maemo, untrustworthy applications don't end up chewing up your battery lifetime. - Ted --