From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1761264AbXGEUA5 (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Jul 2007 16:00:57 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1757501AbXGEUAv (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Jul 2007 16:00:51 -0400 Received: from mga09.intel.com ([134.134.136.24]:44237 "EHLO mga09.intel.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752006AbXGEUAu (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Jul 2007 16:00:50 -0400 X-ExtLoop1: 1 X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.16,505,1175497200"; d="scan'208";a="103316378" Message-ID: <468D4D82.8030009@linux.intel.com> Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:58:58 -0700 From: Arjan van de Ven User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5 (Windows/20051201) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Liunx power consumption on laptops -- Enormous progress in the last few months Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi, with all the tickless and other goodies going into the kernel in the last few months, there is a lot of hope that this helps Linux reduce power consumption... and the good news is that it does... once you fix some bugs and fix a bunch of userspace applications. While it's hard to show "one size fits all" number/percentage, we took a bog standard Lenovo T61 laptop (no vendor preference, they just were the first one to deliver a model with the latest Intel chipset to our cubes) and measured the effect. The baseline we used was a 32 bit Fedora 7 installation; note that this already has the tickless kernel, but is lacking several of the key bugfixes that came afterwards. We've put our measurements in a graph at http://ww.linuxpowertop.org/results.php With kernel fixes and features, the power consumption of this laptop went from 21.06 Watts to 18.25 Watts; with 2 additional userspace fixes the power consumption ended up at 15.5 Watts. (Don't worry that this is the end of it; there's more stuff in the various project pipelines, and we'll keep measuring the progress over time) All in all, personally I'm very happy to see Linux making such a huge step forward with tickless and can't wait for this step to be available in all distros and for all architectures... Greetings, Arjan van de Ven