Intel and PowerTOP extend Linux laptop battery life

[praka123]

Intel recently released its PowerTOP utility, which builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel power-efficient. PowerTOP gives you a snapshot of what apps are consuming the most power. Turn off these apps or modify their behavior, and you'll notice an instant increase in the battery life.



When announcing the PowerTOP utility on the Linux kernel mailing list last week, Intel's Arjan van de Ven said that the tickless-idle feature in the latest 2.6.21 kernel helps save a lot of power by allowing the processor to be idle for long periods of time, instead of waking up every millisecond for the timer tick.
But there's more to a Linux distribution than the kernel; applications may also have tunables to help save power. How do you see which apps are hogging the processor and consuming power? The top utility gives the percentage of CPU and memory individual processes are taking, but that doesn't help much, since there's no power-related information there. That's where PowerTOP comes in.
read:
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/05/16/1742204

[mediator]

Excellent!

[eddie]

Yes it is a very nice initiative. Also, they are providing patches for the faulty applications to make them more power efficient. Can become a real boon for laptop users

[azaad_shri75]

badiya hai.

[great_manish]

finally we r seeing the big companies(hardware manufacturing) doing something for the open source movement !!...

[praka123]

^^ big corporations already submits patches and codes to Linux kernel in a regular way.
http://kernelnewbies.org
and check the changelogs