moar zoobs pls

[kirkcudbright]

Upgrading my netbook from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 has turned the already-flaccid 2-hour battery into a 1½-hour battery. The power monitor has a spiffy graphing function, but it doesn't tell me what's been sucking the battery, the way my google-phone does.

Comments

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

Would "top" help?

[pywaket.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....interesting. I haven't noticed any differrence in battery life since upgrading.

If you do find a tool for determining what's drawing the zoobs, i'd be interested to know about it.

[pywaket.livejournal.com]

A bit of poking around and I've found this:
http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/

You might find something of use there...

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

powertop shows what seems to be an excessive number of "Load balancing ticks". This is a known problem in the 2.6.32 kernel (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/524281).

I just upgraded to the latest Ubuntu-provided kernel (still 2.6.32, different build), but that doesn't seem to have fixed things. I guess I just have to wait for them to rev up to .33 or .34 or something, or manually rev down to .31.

[kirkcudbright.livejournal.com]

Oh right, and the initial comparison was to Android, which tells me how much power has gone to the display, to the radios, etc., not just CPU wakeups. However, since the 9.10 -> 10.04 upgrade was all about software (esp kernel), powertop is not a bad tool for that.