Anyone using powertop?

[exeterdad]

I've been experimenting trying to lower my power consumption for my laptop, and my wife's VL laptop.

Using powertop on a standard VL kernel, and turning my LCD backlight to the lowest, and doing all the "on the fly" settings that powertop suggests while running, and vcpufreq with ondemand, I can achive a power usage just under 17 watts. Of course while compiling a new kernel with -j5 it's sucking up about 45 watts.

Making a custom kernel enabling/disabling config options according to lesswatts.org, and using the same configuration, I can only save about a watt.  I'm rather disappointed I must admit.  Not in our kernel, but my new battery only runs about 2-1/2 hours. I was hoping to do better.

Has anyone had any success stories?

But on the bright side, our default kernel is configured to run well on everyones machine, and still has pretty good power usage.

[uelsk8s]

have you tried this http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/

[exeterdad]

have you tried this http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/

I haven't worked with it yet.  Although that is coming right up on my "to do" list.  I'd like to get my kernel dialed in and figure out why I'm getting so many interupts. Especially from acpi.  Also acpid's constant and heavy logging won't ever let me shut my HD down.  I've found I can set up a socket and have it all sent to /dev/null once I don't actually need to read the logs any more.  Or...  I can upgrade it.  Later versions send output to syslog now.

I'm also looking into ppm "power profile manager" from lesswatts.  Looks ver interesting as different levels of power management can be controlled from userspace.  Rather then have hardcoded settings that might not completely fit from day to day.  But documentation is sparse on it, so it might be tough figuring out how to set it up correctly.

If there is interest, I'll definitely package up what I can. Don't know how "out of the box" I can make it work for people though.  Powertop alone would require a custom kernel to be affective.

Thanks for the link though.  Keep em coming if you got em   I've found quite a interest in power management and acpi, might do our community some good.