Re: high power consumption in recent kernels

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:06:32 +0200
Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 01:45 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> 
> > it seems that some of the (?)recent(?) changes have increased the
> > power consumption of my note book considerably.
> > 
> > First of all, running powertop with normal programs started, but 
> > doing nothing, I am still at 14W while I could go down to 9W before
> > (but the 9W was with dimmed display).
> > 
> > In the list of top causes for wakeup I have
> > Top causes for wakeups:
> >   34.2% (185.3)   [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
> >   23.9% (129.6)   [extra timer interrupt]
> >   10.8% ( 58.6)   firefox-bin
> >    9.2% ( 49.7)   [iwlagn] <interrupt>
> >    7.2% ( 39.1)   [kernel core] hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
> >    3.9% ( 20.9)   PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad interrupt
> > which show one new thing to me I haven't seen before, the Loa
> > balancing tick.
> 
> I think that is what powertop calls our regular tick (Arjan?), and as

it's "hrtimer_start_range_ns (tick_sched_timer)" if it's done by the
idle thread.