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Revision as of 15:02, 16 December 2008 by Pknirsch (talk | contribs)

Power Management improvements

Summary

Improve the current state of power management, especially in regard to userland.

Owner

  • Phil Knirsch (Lead, tuned, documentation)
  • Jiri Skala (BLTK packager)

Current status

  • Targeted release: [Fedora 11]
  • Last updated: (12/12/08)
  • Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

Power management and power saving in Fedora has been a topic is special areas over the last few releases. Using powertop especially for Fedora 9 quite a few improvements were already done, but there is still lots of things that haven't been touched in regard to power saving.

Benefit to Fedora

Simple: On average use less power for turned on machines while not affecting user experience (a lot ;)).

Scope

  • Review and fix behaviour of typical applications in a full installed Fedora in regard to:
    • CPU wakeups
    • Disk IO
    • Network IO
  • Add a workload measurement package to Fedora (BLTK adapted to Fedora use case)
  • Enable relatime for filesystem by default during installation
  • Write a monitoring and tuning daemon that adapts system settings to the current use
  • Review services and make a framework that will allow services to start depending on installed hardware or software
  • Provide scripts and documentation to perform an individual review of a system and tips & tricks on how to improve it

Test Plan

  1. Run Fedora 10 and, measure the the power usage for 1 day
  2. Run Fedora 11 on the same hardware and compare the power usage over 1 day with Fedora 10

User Experience

As power saving is not really visible without a measuring it the effects will not be directly visible. So in order to really see the effect you'll either need a laptop and run that on battery power or a wattmeter that is hooked between your system and the power line.


Dependencies

Anaconda changes (for relatime) Fixes need to get included to have an effect (really ;)).

Contingency Plan

Make sure none of the more aggressive power saving features breaks on common hardware and back it out it case it does.

Documentation

TBW

Release Notes

Users of Fedora 11 should be able to see some reduction in power usage of their systems.