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"What's eating the battery life of my laptop?" Arjan van de Ven rhetorically asked in an announcement about a new PowerTOP utility released by Intel for detecting what Linux programs and kernel tunables are resulting in the most power consumption. "Why isn't it many more hours? Which software component causes the most power to be burned? These are important questions without a good answer... until now." Arjan went on to describe the new tickless kernel feature that was merged in 2.6.21-rc1 [story] noting that it can help reduce power consumption by allowing the CPU to remain idle for longer periods, "current processors save a lot of power if they are idle for long periods, which translates into a longer battery life for your laptop, or a lower energy bill for your datacenter." He continued on to describe the new utility:
"Intel is proud to announce the PowerTOP tool, a program that collects the various pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. In addition, PowerTOP will provide an indication of which tunables and software components are the biggest offenders in slurping up your battery time. PowerTOP will update it's display frequently so that you can directly see the impact of any changes you are making."
From: Arjan van de Ven [email blocked] To: Linux Kernel Mailing List [email blocked] Subject: [announce] Intel announces the PowerTOP utility for Linux Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 16:07:18 -0700 What's eating the battery life of my laptop? Why isn't it many more hours? Which software component causes the most power to be burned? These are important questions without a good answer... until now. The Linux 2.6.21 kernel introduces the so called tickless-idle feature. This feature allows the processor to be really idle for long periods of time, rather than having to wake up every millisecond for the timer tick. Current processors save a lot of power if they are idle for long periods, which translates into a longer battery life for your laptop, or a lower energy bill for your datacenter. However, a Linux system consists of more software than just the kernel, and there are many tunables involved. It's not easy to see what is going on, and as a result the behavior is sometimes far from optimal, and a lot of power is wasted. Intel is proud to announce the PowerTOP tool (http://www.linuxpowertop.org), a program that collects the various pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. In addition, PowerTOP will provide an indication of which tunables and software components are the biggest offenders in slurping up your battery time. PowerTOP will update it's display frequently so that you can directly see the impact of any changes you are making. A typical Linux distribution has many components that wake the processor up frequently for no good reason. In our testing with PowerTOP, we have seen many cases where with some simple fixes, the battery life of typical laptops was increased by one hour or more! We are providing fixes for several of the issues we identified, and we encourage the Linux community to help us in this quest to get the maximum battery life out of your (hopefully Intel based) laptops. Try the PowerTOP tool, join the mailing list or the IRC channel and provide feedback, problem reports or fixes! Website: http://www.linuxpowertop.org IRC: irc.oftc.net #powertop channel Mailing list: http://www.bughost.org/mailman/listinfo/power
Finally! Excellent! I can't
Finally! Excellent! I can't wait to try it out.
Switch off LCD's light
On Acer Travel Mate 660 series, there is a function (Fn + F6) to switch LCD's light off, when not using it. Ussually I using the function when leaving the notebok for packet sniffing (either wired or wireless)
:).
Re: Switch off LCD's light
Wellll... I'd be almost be astonished to find a notebook where it's NOT possible to do this.
But while this is a good thing in those cases where you want to make sure the display is permanently off,
the usual way to do this automatically is by adding DPMS entries into /etc/X11/xorg.conf, for screen blanking, dimming or off state (it's probably preferrable to elegantly configure those settings via KDE control panel, however, and I'm sure GNOME has something similar).
Unfortunately my notebook is old enough to not support dimmed state (e.g. modern notebooks such as MacBooks have it). I'd looove to have that.
That is what i need - my
That is what i need - my laptop battery only lasts 1 hour.
and?
and?
"Powertop is a command-line
"Powertop is a command-line tool released by Intel that shows you the power consumption of the applications running on your system. It works best on notebooks with Intel mobile processors and can help you find out the programs that put a strain on your notebook battery. It requires kernel 2.6.21 or newer with tickless idle enabled (CONFIG_NO_HZ) (which is currently available for 32-bit kernels only). Fedora 7 comes with a 2.6.21 kernel by default, so we can use Powertop on it..."
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Submited by : Caballos
I don't have to care for my
I don't have to care for my laptop as it has already been out of use. I use my laptop just like a pc, and about the question that you told are unanswered, yeah it's really happening so.