Haiku Power Management

1

Recently I read another Haiku review (in Polish language).

http://blog.techvortal.pl/index.php/2014/haikuadalovelace-pierwsze-wrazenie/

Power consumption in a laptop - Lenovo IdeaPad z580:

  1. Haiku hrev46767 gcc2h: 9,24-10,30 W
  2. Linux without Bumblebee and latest kernel: 18W
  3. Windows 8.1 without Lenovo software for power management: up to 23W

Haiku has disabled the wi-fi card , bluetooth, second graphics card and webcam, due to lack of drivers. The backlight was highest in Haiku. I think the difference in watts results from this. But Haiku has rudimentary support for ACPI. It looks nice.

2

Btw. distrubutions I’ve tested on this hardware were:

  • Ubuntu 13.10
  • Crunchbang
  • Lubuntu 13.10
  • elementary OS Luna

Of course Windows 8 (not 8.1) could get to 7-9W, but as I actually had this device with this OS preinstalled, I think it’s not that surprising. At this point, Windows 8.1 can achieve 10-12W, pretty weird difference, but it’s definitely a driver issue here - lenovo doesn’t recommend doing the upgrade on this laptop actually.

Anyway, Haiku’s performance on this hardware is pretty impressive. If anyone remembers this thread: https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/any_tips_running_haiku_my_laptop_z580
You can see how much it improved in the last 5 months. Awesome ^^

Btw. if anyone’s interested, I could translate this blog post to English and put it somewhere here. It’s actually mine :slight_smile:

3

Hi ksiazkowicz!

[quote=ksiazkowicz]
Btw. if anyone’s interested, I could translate this blog post to English and put it somewhere here. It’s actually mine :)[/quote]
Please do so! Submit it as a new article (the second from the left icon on the top right of the pages here).

Nice work!
Humdinger

4

From what I recall from CPU Idle GSoC we still have two sources waking the cpu’s more than needed:

  • Tracker / Deskbar doing old style polling on filesystem.
  • Networking timer ticking at 1000 HZ.
    This network timer is not used that much, with a bit of work it could probably be removed.
    It’s used to check physical connection, scan wlans, bandwidth throttling (not available in Haiku) but not much else. On FreeBSD Arm it is set to 100Hz which would improve this quite a bit as well. Havn’t looked in recent FreeBSD’s if they still use it.