Hello,
I'm a Summer of Code student working with Dean. My interests are the
Linux port, specifically ensuring Chromium behaves well on low spec
machines.
So far I've spent my 'summer' (it's winter here in Australia) on the
ARM port of Chromium. As of the recent v8 gyp changes, the tree can
build for ARM (and thumb, for a binary that's around ~25% smaller) and
I've used it to browse on real hardware; the Beagleboard, an OMAP3
based ARM board with 128MB of RAM.
I've been looking into what to work on next. I'd like to investigate
the possibility of reducing the amount of work being done when running
on battery.
On my laptop I send SIGSTOP to Firefox when I'm not using it, to save
battery without losing state. This saves me 1 Watt when running Gmail
in Firefox 3, or around 8% of the system power draw on my Thinkpad
X300.
As we're multi process with Chrome we could instead suspend any
background renderers, plugin and extension processes without affecting
the foreground tabs.
Some obvious gotchas
- when tabs share renderers, we can't indiscriminately stop background tabs
- we can't just sigstop the renderer process, as the browser will
think it has crashed
Other things to look at would be timers that fire 'too often', and
pausing animated content such as gifs and flash.
Wakeups are not too bad, but any savings will mean longer lasting batteries:
28.4% (187.4) firefox-3.5 : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
4.1% ( 26.9) chrome : hrtimer_start_range_ns (hrtimer_wakeup)
2.3% ( 15.0) chrome : ep_poll (process_timeout)
(Powertop output of Firefox 3 vs Chromium trunk, one tab running Gmail, on
Ubuntu Karmic)
Perhaps we could run a powertop bot, that monitors an idle session
with a few tabs opened to catch any regressions with timers.
I plan to spend some time looking into this. Feedback and suggestions
would be appreciated.
Cheers,
Joel
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