I am not an expert (and this might be wrong), but I'm pretty sure mouse movements cause hardware interrupts which the CPU and therefore the kernel have no choice but to wake up for.
I think hardware would have to be changed for you to really get any better results with the mouse movements. Perhaps some sort of mouse-GPU tie-in and hardware accelerated mouse movements that don't require the CPU. I also don't think it should be affecting battery life very much because usually when you move the mouse, you will click on something or move over some object and it will need to wake up the CPU anyway. Of course I might be wrong.... -Bryan On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Alberto Gonzalez <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > [I know that this is a very basic question and I expected to find it in the > FAQ or something, but after reading the documentation, searching in the > list > archives and google'ing I couldn't find it, so there it goes] > > I've been playing with Powertop and found it very useful. After following > the > suggestions and making some changes I can get my system to be in the > "green" > side (less than 10 wakeups per second) while idle. But now I wonder how > much > this will help if simply moving the mouse can cause 450 wakeups per second. > Is this really unavoidable? > > I guess it must be to achieve a great precision in fast mouse movements, > maybe > necessary for some games, but for normal usage couldn't it be enough with > something in the line of 20-40 wakeups per second? I mean, no one is going > to > play fast action games in a (linux) laptop while on battery, so couldn't it > be possible to have a powersave mode to use while on battery (just as other > components have powersave modes that might hurt performance/latency a bit)? > > Or maybe all those wakeups don't affect battery life enough to even care > about > it? > > Thanks, > Alberto. > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.lesswatts.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
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