Sabayon 3.4 and powertop

[gbr]

Hi,

It would be great if the default kernel shipped with 3.4 supported powertop. Any chances of this happening?

Gerald

[voxiac]

Their page says:

For PowerTOP to work best, use a Linux kernel with the tickless idle (NO_HZ) feature enabled (version 2.6.21 or later). Currently, only 32-bit kernels have support for tickless idle; 64-bit kernels are expected to gain this feature in version 2.6.23.

So if you look into kernel config for 3.4 loop 2 x86 here:
http://www.sabayonlinux.org/sabayon/kco ... p2b.config
and search for 'NO_HZ' then you'll notice that it's enabled. But it's only for x86 mind you.

Or you had something else in mind?

[gbr]

Powertop likes more stats to display, so the following would be nice:
CONFIG_TIMER_STATS (which is CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL=y in the config file)

And it also complains about this:
Disable the CONFIG_IRQBALANCE kernel configuration option.
The in-kernel irq balancer is obsolete and wakes the CPU up far more than needed.

There may be a couple more, but I haven't recompiled my kernel to find out yet.

[gbr]

3,4 says it supports powertop, but it doesn't really. So, I compiled a new kernel to get all the powertop options turned on. I also re-compiled all my modules. Now, XGL displays badly on my ATI X700. After I recompiled XGL things looked better, but KDE wouldn't start. Weird stuff for just a kernel compile. I ended up re-installing 3.4e.

So, back to my original question: Will Sabayon fully implement the kernel option required by powertop?

Thanks,
Gerald

[voxiac]

I think it could benefit everyone if you expanded on what 3.4 doesn't do properly in order to support powertop... The more concrete the better, you know...

[gbr]

I think it could benefit everyone if you expanded on what 3.4 doesn't do properly in order to support powertop... The more concrete the better, you know...

Powertop likes more stats to display, so the following would be nice:
CONFIG_TIMER_STATS (which is CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL=y in the config file)

And it also complains about this:
Disable the CONFIG_IRQBALANCE kernel configuration option.
The in-kernel irq balancer is obsolete and wakes the CPU up far more than needed.

There may be a couple more, but I haven't recompiled my kernel to find out yet.

Gerald

[voxiac]

Then you could point out that nothing has changed since loop 2... you didn't in your post, that's why I assumed that they had changed something for powertop but not everything... You also mention your own fiddling with the 3.4 kernel: what exactly have you changed and did that result in complete powertop compatibility?
The line:

There may be a couple more, but I haven't recompiled my kernel to find out yet.

suggested that you didn't know all the options needed for powertop before. Do you know it now after your exeriments with kernel recompilation?

[gbr]

The 3.4 release notice says Sabayon supports better power management:

Distribution Features:
# The most advanced: Linux Kernel 2.6.22 with extra Power Management (PowerTop), Wireless (mac80211), Ext4 Filesystem, Scheduler (CFS) and Virtualization (KVM,Virt-Manager,VirtualBox) support

It doesn't even ship with powertop, and when I installed it myself, the kernel did not support it. That was my point. I'll wait for 2.6.23 before I do another kernel compile.

Gerald