Re: [gpm] New preferences UI

[Holger Macht <hmacht suse de>]

On Mon 18. Dec - 21:12:13, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-12-18 at 20:52 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 16, 2006 at 01:58:19PM +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2006-12-14 at 21:16 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > > 
> > > > I've been playing with the new preferences UI in the 2.17 releases, and 
> > > > so far I'm not especially keen.
> > > 
> > > Have a look that the attached image.
> > 
> > That's definitely better, but it still seems to have support for setting 
> > the CPUfreq governer. On any modern hardware, what's the use case for 
> > this being anything other than ondemand?
> 
> Well, I for one get a >200ms latency when I click the menus (i.e. less
> snappy) when I'm scaled down to 1GHz - and I've noticed conservative and
> ondemand take quite a while to "ramp up" when the cpu load goes up. Some
> people might also not want the computer to scale at all.

As Mattthew already said, you shouldn't notice a significant amount of
time when frequency increases. Otherwise there's definitely something
wrong on your machine ;-)

> Maybe these are all just excuses - maybe we should just say
> "ondemand" (or conservative if available) for battery power, and
> "performance" on AC. It would sure make the difficult to explain problem
> option in the UI unnecessary.
> 
> What does everyone else think?

Using fixed frequency is always bad idea. That's why there's this
'performance setting' for all dynamic governors in the hal cpufreq
addon. I think it's just enough to always use ondemand, with different
performance settings for AC (e.g. 25) and battery (e.g. 75).

What I thought about for kpowersave was (not sure if I'll do it):

  Only show a slider for CPU policy

  1 --------------- 50 --------------- 100

  Everything between 2 and 99 just sets the performance setting for the
  current dynamic governor. If the user sets it to 1, powersave governor
  is used, if set to 100, performance governor is used.

But it should be completely fine to just always set the ondemand governor
with predefined performance values. A gconf key would be fine, though.

And please note, once in a while the conservative governor gets very bad
press on the kernel lists. So in its current state, I discourage everybody
to use it.

Regards,
	Holger