Re: [Powertop] powertop putting far too much blame on wifi

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 05, 2014 at 12:00:02PM -0800, powertop-request(a)lists.01.org wrote:
> From: Marc MERLIN <marc_powertop(a)merlins.org>

> Unfortunately, it's not just you. I've reported the same problem
> multiple times over the last year, but not heard back from anyone yet
> (except you saying you see the same).
> 
> I had this on a T530, and now it's even worse on a T540:
> The battery reports a discharge rate of 28.5 W
> The estimated remaining time is 1 hours, 53 minutes
> 
> Summary: 689.5 wakeups/second,  214.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 10.4% CPU use
> 
> Power est.              Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
>   15.3 W     95.8%                      Device         Display backlight
>   2.07 W     36.0 ms/s     642.4        Process        /usr/bin/enlightenment
>   115 mW      4.5 ms/s      62.3        Interrupt      PS/2 Touchpad / Keyboard / Mouse
>  86.8 mW      0.9 ms/s      37.0        Process        xfce4-terminal -T window11 --role=window11 --tab
>  71.3 mW     35.4 ms/s      36.2        Process        /usr/bin/X :0 vt7 -br -nolisten tcp -auth /var/r
>  51.2 mW      0.8 ms/s      27.9        Timer          hrtimer_wakeup
> 
> 15W for my backlight at mid brightness? I don't think so.

600+ wakeups/second sounds like the usual intermediate activity
due to touchpad/mouse movement (that figure is exactly what I usually got
on my machine), and if that is the case
(what happens if the human part gets its dirty fingers off the machine? :)
then it's strange to see this otherwise *very high* value (642.4)
attributed to /usr/bin/enlightenment (a very seasoned/stable WM, for
crying out loud) rather than mouse as in the *directly following*
    PS/2 Touchpad / Keyboard / Mouse
line.

Or, in other words, this example hints at a rather mischievous mixup of data,
e.g. an off-by-1 or a post-insert of certain items without accounting for other
columns (within the data model, of course), or perhaps (the column data values
might even support such a suspicion) even completely wrong (re-sorted)
display of data.

Perhaps I should actually test/investigate a recent powertop version... ;)

Andreas Mohr

-- 
GNU/Linux. It's not the software that's free, it's you.