Re: [patch] i386 dynamic ticks 2.6.13-rc4 (code reordered)

Tony Lindgren
2005-08-02T07:22:45Z

* Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org> [050801 21:41]:
> This is a code reordered version of the dynamic ticks patch from Tony Lindgen
> and Tuukka Tikkanen - sorry about spamming your mail boxes with this, but
> thanks for the code. There is significant renewed interest by the lkml
> audience for such a feature which is why I'm butchering your code (sorry
> again if you don't like me doing this). The only real difference between your
> code and this patch is moving the #ifdef'd code out of code paths and putting
> it into dyn-tick specific files.

Great! We ported it from ARM to x86 so people could develop it further. Help
is really appreciated to get it into shape for integration.

> This has slightly more build fixes than the last one I posted and boots and
> runs fine on my laptop. So far at absolute idle it appears this pentiumM 1.7
> is claiming to have _25%_ more battery life. I'll need to investigate further
> to see the real power savings.

What is your HZ according to pmstats?

> My desktop pentium4 did not like the patch erroring with "bad gzip magic
> number" on boot for reasons that aren't obvious to me. This could be related
> to trying gcc 4.0.1 on that box whereas the laptop is on gcc 3.4.4 and is
> working fine.

Yeah, this sounds like an issue with the decompression code.

Tony