Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1761 mails)

[Peter Suetterlin <P.Suetterlin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anton Aylward wrote:
> Peter Suetterlin said the following on 08/25/2010 08:40 AM:
> > Rodney Baker wrote:
> >
> > > Turning of KDE4's desktop effects (i.e. suspend compositing) will drop the
> > > CPU usage to near zero again.

> > While true, this is only a workaround.  Wasting 20% of a really powerful
> > machine for *nothing* (it uses it even if nothing happens) is a bug and
> > not a blemish....

> The same could be said of any GUI ...
> "we command line fanatics ..."

Sorry Anton, you didn't get my point.  I don't mind too much if a more
powerfull processor allows to do eye candy and stuff like that.  But if
nothing is going on in the GUI (no mouse moving etc.) and still the CPU usage
is at 20% this is a BUG, as well as a busy wait loop in any application is a
bug.

This holds even more as this 'feature' seems to depend on the
version/combination of X-server, kernel and graphics card driver but (as far
as I can tell) seems to happen only with kwin.  

So I repeat my statement, an idle system must not use substantial CPU time

> The answer is the user.
> In practice, delivered CPU power has stayed about the same as the
> workload and complexity and presentation has grown ore sophisticated.

As said above, this is fine when doing something.  Sitting there, displaying a
static screen is not supposed to burn cycles.  If it does it is either a darn
wrong concept (like busy-wait-loop) or a race condition somewhere in the
system (like it is/was with the X-server using 100% CPU when KDE set the
display to suspend mode, iirc).

Cheers,

  Pit

-- 
Dr. Peter "Pit" Suetterlin                 http://www.astro.su.se/~pit
Institute for Solar Physics
Tel.: +34 922 405 590  (Spain)             P.Suetterlin@xxxxxxxxxxxx
      +46 8 5537 8507  (Sweden)            Peter.Suetterlin@xxxxxxxxxxx
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