Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 18th Sep 2009 17:30 UTC, submitted by Moulinneuf
We all know (and love?) ARM as the company which focusses on licensing designs for power-efficient yet still powerful processors, mostly used in embedded devices. The Cambridge company has been looking to expand into the netbook market, and has now announced a new step in this process with a number of new multicore Cortex-A9 designs.
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Member since:2005-11-14
Member since:2005-07-06
Really? I'm running powertop at the moment, and HAL doesn't even show.
Which distribution? I know that there have been several distributions that have wound back what HAL does these days with the advent of devicekit but there were something like 6-10 components which kept waking up the CPU. Even so, HAL is hardly an ideal situation given how horribly buggy and unreliable given my experience. GNOME 2.28 has been demarcated HAL to be removed and apparently by 2.30/3.0 it will be 100% removed and replaced with Devicekit, Devicekit-power and Devicekit-Storage.
If there is a slick version of Linux bundled with the ARM Netbook, people will purchase it; the problem has been so far is the half assed efforts by OEM vendors in making sure everything works reliably.
Member since:2007-09-22
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2005-07-06
Question: It is my understanding that BeOS/Haiku uses the 'HALT' instruction to lower power use when the CPU is idle and waiting for an interrupt, does the ARM have such an instruction/mode and if it does how much power is used compared to normal CPU needs?
I am thinking in term of a large number of cores when a number of them will sit idle when there is not a heavy load on the system.
From what I understand Haiku is based on the NewOS kernel which includes support inside it for multiplatformness.
The problem with Linux is the need to get rid of HAL and replace it with something that doesn't depend on a constant cycle of polling. Once HAL is replaced you'll find that battery life will improve considerably when combined with the improvements that are slated for 2.6.32.