Re: [gpm] New preferences UI

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 15:07 +0100, Holger Macht wrote:
> On Mon 18. Dec - 23:30:20, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 00:16 +0100, Holger Macht wrote:
> > > 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 ;-)
> > 
> > Hmm. Maybe it's my brain playing to a preconceived idea. :-)
> > 
> > > > 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).
> > 
> > I didn't know you could adjust the ondemand or conservative schedulers.
> > What does the performance setting do?
> 
> It's written down in the HAL spec or a little bit more detailed at [1]. In
> a few words, the higher the performance setting, the faster and the sooner
> the frequency is switched up. And it's independent from the governor used
> as long as it is one of the dynamic ones (userspace, ondemand).

Gotcha. Thanks for the link.

I've applied this to CVS head:

2006-12-19  Richard Hughes  <richard hughsie com>

	* data/gnome-power-manager.schemas.in:
	Change default to be ondemand at 85 performance on AC and
	ondemand at 25 performance on battery. Ubuntu set ondemand
	by default, and have had no bad reports.
	The rationale for this change is that we should still save
	power on AC, there's no point having the processor run at
	100 percent when the system is idle.

	* src/gpm-cpufreq.c: (gpm_cpufreq_set_performance):
	Allow setting the performance for the dynamic policies.

Should I now disable (or remove) the controls in gconf?

Richard.