Recently developers at Intel released a tool called PowerTOP. For users familiar with top on Unix systems, this tool is similar, except it displays information on programs that are "waking" up the CPU often. What does this mean? To cut a long story short, it means you can now identify which programs are interrupting a CPU's sleep, and determine if that interruption could have been handled in a better way, letting the CPU sleep longer. That way, battery power could be saved.
Why is this tool a good example of Free Software at work? Not only did the developers create this tool, they also identified many free/open source software programs where things could be done better. Because the source was available, they were even able to make patches -- or modifications -- available so that battery life was extended by "an hour or more!" This is amazing. Imagine doing this on your insert-favorite-proprietary-operating-system here. It'd take years for the OS vendor to get it, then the programmers to get it, and then for them to get together and do it.
Why is this on my blog? I use liferea, a feed reader that manages my RSS feeds, and the latest release has this cryptic changelog: "This release decreases CPU power consumption for laptop users". My life is already better, thanks to PowerTOP.
Oh yeah, bonszai says, "Thank you, Intel!"
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2 comments:
Initially, I was skeptical about this; few users are going to take trouble to apply the patches. But, it seems that the developers are integrating the patches into the apps. Just fetched powertop from the Debian repo.
Just for completeness: The solution in Liferea is not yet perfect there is still another high-res timer to fix. But I promise to do it asap (as soon as my Debian Unstable gets glib > 2.14).
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