power management experiences with joyride-1572

[Ivan Krstić]

On Jan 25, 2008, at 1:31 AM, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> if the all brand new XO-focused software doesn't already do this

We're building a platform, and have been completely and brutally  
transparent about our progress. Software built on our platform will  
keep improving rapidly along a number of axes, power management being  
one, and even more rapidly if folks jump in and help us with the work.  
Patches welcome ;)

> So you may end up needing a tool that applies heuristics and  
> overrides the CPU
> requests of poor programs.

As an anecdote, I spend a non-trivial amount of time working in  
disconnected environments using battery power on my non-XO laptop, and  
I've been obtaining noticeable battery life gains by manually  
SIGSTOPping Firefox when not in use. Now, I usually have about 70-200  
tabs open -- which may be an edge case, but _shouldn't_ be:  
programmers need to learn that when I'm not actively using their  
software, it shouldn't be _doing_ stuff on my machine without a very  
good reason.

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org