[desktop-discuss] [gpm] GNOME Power Manager Needs Power Scheme Option?

[James Cornell]

Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 14:04 +0800, Jeff Cai wrote:
>   
>> Performance
>>         Keep your machine running with full power and full speed to
>>         achieve maximum performance.
>> Acoustic
>>         Apply any measure that makes sure your machine runs as quietly
>>         as possible.
>> Presentation
>>         Disable any display power management and screen savers to make
>>         sure that your presentation is not interrupted by a blanked
>>         display or such like.
>> Powersave
>>         Apply aggressive power management methods to make sure that your
>>         machine runs as long as possible when put on battery power
>>         instead of AC power.
>>     
>
> Being very blunt, I would argue that these profiles are very much the
> wrong way to do this. When would the user change to "presentation mode"
> - You don't think "I'm going to play a video, I must change the
> powersaving mode before I do" - you just play the video.
>
> Using hooks such as inhibit, we can stop the screen blanking when
> Openoffice is fullscreen, or totem is playing a video. We can add clever
> hooks to software so that the user doesn't have to do anything clever;
> it just works.
>
> As for performance, we don't need that. The default Linux ondemand
> scheduler very quickly goes up to full 100% with very little latency.
> There's really no point whatsoever for a "powersave" vs. "performance"
> as in performance you're basically just wasting power and heating up the
> room. I've talked with Intel in detail about this.
>
> For acoustic, I could see the need for a:
>
> [x] Run computer as quiet as possible
>
> Although, this only changes the hard drive spindown and other vendor
> specific hdd parameters.
>
> Richard.
>
>
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>   
Agreed, profiles aren't the best way.  For now it's the easiest to 
implement, but for the long-term I really like your idea about hooking 
certain power-hungry programs to adjust the frequency, etc.

James