panel plugins that cause too many wakeups/s

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Christian Dywan wrote:
>>> battery monitor plugin: 3
>> I believe the current released battery plugin polls for battery
>> status, so there's not much you can do except increase the interval.
>> The version in Nick's "hal_based" branch in SVN works very well, and
>> doesn't poll, but instead uses HAL which does async notification of
>> changes. I've been using it for many months now without problems, and
>> I never see it show up in powertop at all.
> 
> Incidentally, why is this still a branch and not replacing trunk? Is it
> because it shouldn't depend on HAL? I've also been running the HAL
> branch for quite some time now and I can't imagine why someone would
> use something else unless that person is unaware of the branch.

HAL only works on Linux and to some extent FreeBSD.  I know there's at 
least code in the current battery plugin that supports OpenBSD as well. 
  It would be a shame to drop platform support like that.

> If HAL
> is the problem, I would at least suggest to merge the two things and
> pick one at build time.

You volunteering?  Go for it.  No?  Anyone else?  I didn't think so...

>> Heh, I can't get my laptop under 200 wakeups per second or so, but 
>> that's probably just ppc kernel issues and too many (hopefully)
>> useless interrupts...  And firefox.
> 
> You are not seriously looking at wakeups while running something like
> firefox, are you? That's like using a full dvd image in order to
> test how good your archiver can compress files :)

Nah, that was a bit of a joke; when I'm actually checking wakeups I give 
firefox a 'kill -STOP' first.  Even then I'm still around 200/sec. 
There hasn't been much work to fix that sort of thing on ppc AFAICT; the 
top wakeup offenders are ironically PMU (Power Management Unit) 
interrupt handlers in the kernel.

	-b