Linux Plumbers Conf 2010

One Line Summary

Abstract

On many systems in which the deepest C-state can be achieved in the idle path just as effectively as the suspend path, why is the power consumption gap between the two so great?

The obvious reason is that CPUIdle respects the scheduler and wakes up often. What can be done to coalesce wake-ups, make timers power-aware and any other mechanisms that might make CPUIdle more competitive with suspend?

Does the kernel have too many badly behaving timers in platform-independent code? Do userspace programmers have the right kind of timers and other APIs to express their needs more realistically? Can we process application timers early or late based on predictable wake-ups from peripheral devices such as modems?

My background is with OMAP, a popular ARM SoC. My jargon might be SoC-specific and the ACPI folks will have to fill in my knowledge gaps for their platforms.

Tags

power management timer wake up idle suspend

Speaker

• Mike Turquette

  Texas Instruments
  • Blog: http://turqee.tumblr.com/
  • Twitter: mturquette

  Biography

  I work for Texas Instruments on OMAP power management in Linux, specifically Android products.