Re: PowerTop discourages beagle

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

Hi,

> The PowerTop program (http://www.linuxpowertop.org/) helps find what is
> using the most power on a machine. Out of the possible suggestions, beagle
> is the only app to be recommended for removal by the tool itself. The
> remaining are kernel. That doesn't seem very fair, does it?

I dont have the required kernel, but I straced an idle beagled (idle = built 
with --disable-xss, ran with  --disable-scheduler; this disables any 
crawling/indexing but query is allowed, and does not do any periodic 
screensaver check).

Beagled is perfectly idle in this setup. Err... near-perfectly idle. Beagle 
uses a thread which wakes up every 30 sec to check battery status 
(reading /proc/ac_adapter/... and stuff). That's the only one working and 
diligently waking up at about 30 secs. Rest of the time, beagled is waiting 
on a poll().

If I disable watching the battery (in BeagleDaemon.cs, comment the line 
containing CheckBatteryStatus), strace just keeps waiting on a poll()

Thats all I can infer using strace: I would be surprised in beagled showed up 
in powertop in this 'idle' mode. Tracing the cpu wakeups in the normal case 
would be difficult, but screensaver monitoring, battery status could be the 
cause and actual presence of indexing jobs would also make a difference.

- dBera

-- 
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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user