Re: reducing power usage of Fedora - how you can help!

["Jonathan Underwood" <jonathan underwood gmail com>]

On 09/08/07, Bill Nottingham <notting redhat com> wrote:
> Would you like your laptop battery to last longer? Would you like your
> servers to use less electricity? We certainly would. So we're investigating
> and fixing Fedora to use less juice.
>
> One of the biggest power problems is apps that wake up the CPU
> unnecessarily. With the tickless kernel for x86 (and soon x86_64),
> every time this happens it's a chance for power savings lost.
>
> HOW YOU CAN HELP
> ----------------
>
> We'd like to get as many reports of misbehaving apps as possible.
>
> 1) Install the 'powertop' package
>
> 2) Run it in a terminal window on a reasonably idle system with your
>    normal combination of apps. (If you run it when you're actively
>    compiling a kernel, watching a movie, or doing other CPU-intensive
>    things, the results aren't as useful.)
>
> 3) Note the results. If you'd like to capture them for safe-keeping
>    later, you can use the (Fedora-specific) '-d' option to dump them
>    to stdout, rather than pasting from the running app.
>
> 4) Report the results. You can add reports here, on #fedora-devel,
>    or to the upstream powertop community at power bughost org or
>    #powertop on irc.oftc.net.
>
>    *** Please use a service such as http://pastebin.ca/ rather than
>    pasting powertop reports directly to an IRC channel. ***
>
>    If you've got a specific app you know is misbehaving, please
>    file a bug with the details, and set it to block the 'wakeup'
>    bug in Fedora bugzilla. (bug number 204948.)
>
> Thanks for your assistance and help.

I see my LCD screen being turned off and on every few seconds when
running powertop. Is that normal behaviour?