Eric Saxe wrote:
> Rafael Vanoni wrote:
>> Eric Saxe wrote:
>>   
>>> Hi Rafael,
>>>
>>> The man page looks good. Here's some more comments:
>>>
>>> "    PowerTOP averages the amount of activity that is preventing the CPU 
>>> from
>>>    entering a lower power state and presents it on the "Wakeups-from-idle
>>>    per second" field. This value represents the total number of events
>>>    divided by the current interval. Notice that not all events are
>>>    displayed on the screen at all times."
>>>
>>> Actually, because all firing cyclics are displayed (without -i), does 
>>> the value represent
>>> the number of times a CPU awoke from a lower power idle state?
>>>     
>> No, and I would even like to change "Wakeups-from-idle" to something 
>> like "Events" or "Activity". IMHO, "Wakeups" is misleading.
>>
>>   
>>> "
>>>    If running as root (superuser), the tool will make suggestions as how
>>>    the system can be improved from a power management perspective."
>>>
>>> root..or are the specific privileges that would work?
>>>     
>> Only root, as the only supported suggestion at the moment is enabling PM 
>> on /etc/power.conf. Don't remember which group is able to modify it, but 
>> maybe we can change it to groupid. Would that be the right approach ?
>>   
> Well, you could just try to do the change, and then if you get EPERM, 
> emit an error message
> like "Unable to edit /etc/power.conf: Permission Denied", or something 
> like that.

Hmm.. ok. But users would get frustrated if we present a frequent 
suggestion they (possibly) can't implement.

> I'm still having a difficult time stomaching that PowerTOP is editing 
> power.conf, running other commands, etc...and it's probably not 
> PowerTOP's fault, we just don't have a good programmatic interface to do 
> this sort of thing yet. But an alternate way to go might be to bring up 
> a screen that gives you a detailed, step by step procedure, for 
> implementing the suggestion.
> 

I agree, the functionality is misplaced.
IMO, suggestions will be unnecessary and potentially counter productive 
once we have the PM framework in place (phase 2).

Rafael




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