Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (551 mails)

[Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@xxxxxxxx>]

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On 05/30/2011 06:29 PM, Kay Sievers wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-05-31 at 00:13 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> > On 2011-05-30 20:49, Kay Sievers wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2011-05-30 at 20:33 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> >
> > > > Whatever, but we were told to start that service to make gnome happy.
> > >
> > > It's to make your kernel happy, that the CPU can safe power if it has
> > > nothing to do. It has nothing to do with the desktop stuff.
> >
> > If that system service is not loaded, my laptop cpu is stuck at the highest
> > speed. And I knew that because gnome told me so, not the kernel.
>
> Ah, good that it tells. But the desktop does not need it.
>
> > > Ideally we would just compile them into the kernel, as only the kernel
> > > knows which of the drivers should actually be used, and not depend on
> > > the loading order userspace provides.
> >
> > Yes and no. The user can decide, for example, to force low speed to
> > maximize battery. Or the contrary.
>
> Low speed does in no way mean less energy on modern boxes. It's a
> legend, and proven wrong many times.
>
> To save energy the system needs to sleep, and when work is to do, it
> need to do the work as fast as possible, to be able to sleep again as
> much as possible. Only sleeping really saves energy not doing work
> slowly.
>
> All that is the kernel's job with the on-demand governor. The powersave
> governor usually does consume more energy, and is pretty useless today.

FWIW, the cpufreq script loads powernow-k8 on my system. Regardless of
your thoughts on power saving, it definitely steps down my processor
(Phenom II X6) and as a result my fan is much, much quieter.

- -Jeff

- -- 
Jeff Mahoney
SuSE Labs
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