yes, general computing generally isnt efficient. On Mon, Mar 16, 2026 at 7:29 PM adventures in9 <[email protected]> wrote:
> At the end of the day, all power efficiency arguments are going to get > pushed down to the hardware. And the low hanging fruit of gaining > efficiency is going to be found by moving away from general purpose > devices. > > Having done some work on porting 9front to the PinePhone, power > management on devices like that is very tricky. It is a balance of > adjusting clock speeds and disabling devices, while also keeping > enough of it running and responsive so things can be turned back on as > needed. > > On the other hand, when working on wifi routers, I found a CPU that > had a special "idle" instruction to easily enter and leave a low power > mode. But the device is simpler overall. > > In a Plan9 context, I think efficiency gains would be best found in > using the distributed computing features to move tasks to devices that > get the best performance per watt. As others have pointed out, the > fact that a base install of Plan9 is rather lean doesn't really mean > much, as it can become just as bloated as any other OS once extra > services are added. > > On Mon, Mar 16, 2026 at 8:42 AM Noam Preil <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > We could probably get much more efficient with some power management > code, though it's worth noting that some of the most frequent bugs i run > into on linux are devices going to sleep and struggling to wake up properly > (e.g. touchpad taking 10 seconds to respond on one laptop). > > > > I've also seen horrible speeds when memory clocks were set to minimum > and wouldn't go back up without either a hardware reset or, inexplicably, > changing between linux ttys (e.g. from wayland to plain tty and back). > (Pretty sure I saw it in x11 too, let's please not derail with linux drama > :) > > > > pm code would be great to have if done right, but it also goes against > the original idea imo: simpler does not necessarily imply more efficient. > > > > 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options > Permalink ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tacc477007dd06ec0-M9e444d7f1abf36a0def4b003 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
