1 What's eating the battery life of my laptop? Why isn't it many more 2 hours? Which software component causes the most power to be burned? 3 These are important questions without a good answer... until now. 4 5 The Linux 2.6.21 kernel introduces the so called tickless-idle 6 feature. This feature allows the processor to be really idle for long 7 periods of time, rather than having to wake up every millisecond for 8 the timer tick. Current processors save a lot of power if they are 9 idle for long periods, which translates into a longer battery life for 10 your laptop, or a lower energy bill for your datacenter. However, a 11 Linux system consists of more software than just the kernel, and there 12 are many tunables involved. It's not easy to see what is going on, and 13 as a result the behavior is sometimes far from optimal, and a lot of 14 power is wasted. 15 16 Intel is proud to announce the PowerTOP tool 17 (http://www.linuxpowertop.org), a program that collects the various 18 pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how 19 well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. In addition, 20 PowerTOP will provide an indication of which tunables and software 21 components are the biggest offenders in slurping up your battery time. 22 PowerTOP will update it's display frequently so that you can directly 23 see the impact of any changes you are making. 24 25 A typical Linux distribution has many components that wake the 26 processor up frequently for no good reason. In our testing with 27 PowerTOP, we have seen many cases where with some simple fixes, the 28 battery life of typical laptops was increased by one hour or more! 29 30 We are providing fixes for several of the issues we identified, and we 31 encourage the Linux community to help us in this quest to get the 32 maximum battery life out of your (hopefully Intel based) laptops. Try 33 the PowerTOP tool, join the mailing list or the IRC channel and 34 provide feedback, problem reports or fixes! 35 36 Website: http://www.linuxpowertop.org 37 IRC: irc.oftc.net #powertop channel 38 Mailing list: http://www.bughost.org/mailman/listinfo/power 39 Tags: intel, linux 40 41 42 43 If you have bugreports or patches, I prefer that you use the mailing list 44 but you can email me directly at arjan (a] linux.intel.com. 45
