PowerTOP for FreeBSD ?

[Wilkinson, Alex]

    0n Tue, May 15, 2007 at 10:12:14AM -0700, Eric Anholt wrote: 

Heya Eric!

    >Until we get tickless scheduling, it's not of much use.

I keep hearing about this "tickless scheduling" but know SFA about it. I assume
it means no ticks (HZ) therefore tones less interrupts therefore less power
consumption? Anyone got a link that explains exactly what it is ?

    >However, the power savings on desktop machines from going tickless and
    >fixing stupid apps is pretty amazing -- the keithp quote about
    >increasing battery life by over 50% was after only about two days of
    >fixing stupid apps, and we're looking at trying to do even better for
    >certain situations (let the cpu sleep for several frames at a time while
    >playing movies, for example).  Most of the app fixes that intel people
    >playing with this tool have have developed (which has included at least
    >ff, evolution, xchat, gaim, network mangler, xf86-video-intel, and
    >gnome-terminal) have been pushed upstream already, so we should all be
    >seeing the wins soon if we can go tickless.  Until then, we'll just get
    >the benefit of not blowing out caches and saving some context switches
    >from apps waking up in order to do nothing.

What is meant by "stupid apps" ?

 -aW

IMPORTANT: This email remains the property of the Australian Defence Organisation and is subject to the jurisdiction of section 70 of the CRIMES ACT 1914.  If you have received this email in error, you are requested to contact the sender and delete the email.