Re: [PATCH] i386: Selectable Frequency of the Timer Interrupt

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Theodore Ts'o wrote:
On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 02:23:08PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:

Because some machines exhibit appreciable latency in entering low power
state via ACPI, and 1000Hz reduces their battery life.  By about half,
iirc.


Then the owners of such machines can use HZ=250 and leave the default
alone.  Why should everyone have to bear the cost?

They need 100 really it seems, 250-500 have no real effect and on the
Dell I tried 250 didn't stop the wild clock slew from the APM bios
either. I played with this a fair bit on a couple of laptops. I've not
seen anything > 20% saving however so I've no idea who/why someone saw
50%


The real answer here is for the tickless patches to cleaned up to the
point where they can be merged, and then we won't waste battery power
entering the timer interrupt in the first place.  :-)

And that does seem to be the long term solution. Most (not all) modern hardware has a readable timer as accurate as the tick, so doing a timer to clock conversion as needed would be possible.

Unfortunately the interest in tickless operation seems to be mostly in the power saving possibilities of laptops. If you could make it part of some really sexy high interest area, like real time premption, it might get done sooner ;-)

--
   -bill davidsen ([email protected])
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
 last possible moment - but no longer"  -me
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