Comments on: Linux coders tackle power efficiency

Programmers have begun serious work to cut consumption, extending PC Linux battery life and easing server costs.

[qwerty75]

Linux was already well ahead of MS

Like everything else.

Without these changes, my SuSE install on my laptop lasts about 95% longer on batteries then the default XP install.

[`WarpKat]

Indeed.

Miguel de Icaza and his team of Mono developers just finished a first implementation of Silverlight for Linux (Moonlight) in 21 days:

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/07/06/25/1427225.shtml

Microsoft takes what...a few months to do something that has security holes in it like swiss cheese?

Open Source philosophy will always be ahead of Microsoft due to the open-eyes approach to rapid application development. Applications pop-up, security holes are spotted and patched almost as fast, and nothing can really match it.

The juxtaposition of these two opposing methods simply makes Microsoft look like a second-rate development house of cheap, out-sourced labor. The irony is that OSS is made up of a world of labor that has a fondness for coding, to see things done right and in an open arena.

[lynxss]

95%?

SuSE is definately better than XP but I dont know about 95% better unless you have XP set to stay in performance mode.

I did a heavy ammount of tweaking both XP and SuSE when I first got my laptop in early 2004 when the mobile Athlon 64s came out. I'd enabled all kinds of power saving tweaks in XP and the AMD power now features to clock down the CPU while in battery as well as cut graphics performance automatically in bat mode and was able to extend battery life in XP by almost an hr.

Under SuSE though, I redid a tempfs to map to RAM instead of disk so browser cache and various other stuff that writes there would not go to disk, I added in some features to spin down and turn off disks in 5 mins and power down sections of the MB not being used, power down broad cast power on my WiFi if I had a good signal, and clock down the CPU while on battery. I somehow had to turn off that annoying tick message that syslogd writes to logs that kept spinning up the HD also. After all that tweaking and 3 months of work in spare time when I was bored I got about an hr and 30-40 mins extra out of battery from default settings. So about an extra 40-50 mins over XP with all its battery saving features turned on.

Still a huge difference but not 95%

This tickless kernel, however, sounds really cool I'd love to try it out and see what it can do.