Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sun 13th May 2007 00:35 UTC, submitted by Luis
What's eating the battery life of my Linux laptop? Which software component causes the most power to be consumed? These are important questions without a good answer... until now. Intel announced 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. A number of apps, like Firefox, Evolution and Gaim have been modified by Intel to help consume less power and hopefully these patches will be integrated to their main trees or by distros.
Permalink for comment 239746
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2006-01-02
I really don't understand how people can think that polling is ever the right solution. It's one of the first things you learn when studying low-power circuitry: asynchronous circuits generally save power. The same thing applies to software. Asynchronous, event-based programming keeps the machine quiescent when nothing is happening.
I think this is one of the few penalties of the distributed method of software development. There is no core set of practices and ideas on how to solve problems that are produced by interactions up and down the entire stack. And the loose-coupling of components often means that the event one desires to wait for is not exposed by the interface for the underlying component.