Re: [gpm] GNOME Power Manager Needs Power Scheme Option?

[Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com>]

On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 14:04 +0800, Jeff Cai wrote:
> Performance
>         Keep your machine running with full power and full speed to
>         achieve maximum performance.
> Acoustic
>         Apply any measure that makes sure your machine runs as quietly
>         as possible.
> Presentation
>         Disable any display power management and screen savers to make
>         sure that your presentation is not interrupted by a blanked
>         display or such like.
> Powersave
>         Apply aggressive power management methods to make sure that your
>         machine runs as long as possible when put on battery power
>         instead of AC power.

Being very blunt, I would argue that these profiles are very much the
wrong way to do this. When would the user change to "presentation mode"
- You don't think "I'm going to play a video, I must change the
powersaving mode before I do" - you just play the video.

Using hooks such as inhibit, we can stop the screen blanking when
Openoffice is fullscreen, or totem is playing a video. We can add clever
hooks to software so that the user doesn't have to do anything clever;
it just works.

As for performance, we don't need that. The default Linux ondemand
scheduler very quickly goes up to full 100% with very little latency.
There's really no point whatsoever for a "powersave" vs. "performance"
as in performance you're basically just wasting power and heating up the
room. I've talked with Intel in detail about this.

For acoustic, I could see the need for a:

[x] Run computer as quiet as possible

Although, this only changes the hard drive spindown and other vendor
specific hdd parameters.

Richard.