consumption of the kernel

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1

Hello,

the problem with the power consumption of the kernels higher than 2.6.37 Do they affect only to laptops or also desktops?

My motherboard Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 is located between those affected. I have no laptop but I doubt installing opensuse 12.1 per if I can increase the power consumption of pc.

Thank you.

2

The kernel by itself has no energy consumption. Your mainboard has. The problem with the linux kernel higher then 2.6.37 is given by an error of the mainboard manufacturers. Faulty implementation of the standards causes a higher energy consumption because the PCI-e ACPI function is not working correctly under normal standards, while the linux kernel which instead is using the function correctly. The recent patch for energy consumption (that is doing nothing more then mimicking the error behaviour as work around that is doing windows), has not been AFAIK implemented in openSUSE 12.1. I do not see however how this could give a problem with your PC or the aforementioned main-board. It does not cause overheating, it just causes higher consumption while idle and this means the autonomy of a laptop will go down from let’s say 6:40 hours to maybe 4 h. No battery is breaking because of this (this is simply FUD spread). There is no problem with overheating of normal main-board chip-set, nor does it cause any problem to a fix PC. Not even to a micro-ATX, since the ventilation is largely sufficient.
I therefore do not really understand your problem?

3

On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:46:02 +0000, jony127 wrote:

> Hello,
>
> the problem with the power consumption of the kernels higher than 2.6.37
> Do they affect only to laptops or also desktops?
>
> My motherboard Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 is located between those affected. I
> have no laptop but I doubt installing opensuse 12.1 per if I can
> increase the power consumption of pc.

I use openSUSE 12.1 on both laptops and desktops alike - if you’ve got an
Intel processor, try installing powertop and see if that helps you
identify what’s consuming power.

Note that the power consumption issues that have been reported are mostly
caused by the Linux kernel now asking what capabilities the hardware has
and then trying to use them - and some hardware apparently reports fewer
capabilities than it actually has for saving power.

There are some workarounds posted in various threads that you should look
into using.

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

4

My question was about whether I can increase my consumption pc desktop or only affects laptop .

5

The answer is, compared to before, it will not “decrease” your consumption as efficiently as it could with a laptop. This will have an impact only if your PC is a) running on an UPS system during a power break, b) if you are using a laptop d) if you have a device which is expected to be constant on and also not ventilated (e.g. some legacy technology in a train-station display or public bus info system.
What cannot happen:

  • you will not experience higher consumption then the one expected by your manufacturer. The worst case scenario will give you full usage of the components during calculation. However this will be important for the PCI-e components AFAIK, as the CPU is correctly handled. The expected symptoms would be, if ever, a stronger (thus slightly noisier activity of the system fan. I heard of no desktop users that would be aware of the problem. The only ones complaining so far have been the laptop users of selected machines.
  • it is not known that the issue would have engendered any hardware damage. It is therefore not a problem that in a normal machine would cause you any trouble. I have it running on a fix PC and I do not encounter any
    issue compared to previous versions (AMD/Nvidia Chip-set).

So I would do as every user does.

  • If your former system is still perfectly working, does not lack of any functionality you do desire and is functioning to your satisfaction, my advice would be “do not change a winning team” at least up to the end of support. You may change however to the current version 12.1 in e.g. March as it will be very stabilized by then.
  • If you have a system that is not satisfying you, that is not giving you access to a functionality that instead the newer one would promise, I would update.

Hope that helps.

6

On Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:06:02 +0000, jony127 wrote:

> My question was about whether I can increase my consumption pc desktop
> or only affects laptop .

If your laptop is an Intel-based system, you can try using powertop to
see what’s using power and to tune your system to more efficiently use
the battery.

I did that with my Dell laptop, and managed about 3 hours from the stock
battery. It wasn’t doing a lot during that time, but you can flip the
governor to ‘conservative’ and it’ll keep the CPU from going above the
minimum speed, which helps a lot, especially in a multi-core system.

Disabling things like bluetooth and wireless when not in use also will
increase battery life.

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

7

Jim, he has a Gigabyte X48T-DQ6, that is a PC. He does not have a laptop and he was somehow unsure if that “powerconsumption” could be a problem for him, having a fix machine. No battery AFAIK, see the first thread.

8

On Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:56:02 +0000, stakanov wrote:

> Jim, he has a Gigabyte X48T-DQ6, that is a PC. He does not have a laptop
> and he was somehow unsure if that “powerconsumption” could be a problem
> for him, having a fix machine. No battery AFAIK, see the first thread.

True that it’s a PC, but if it’s an Intel-based PC, powertop should still
give him ideas about how power is being used by the system, and adjusting
some of the parameters will still affect the amount of power the system
uses/needs.

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

9

Agreed upon. But I understood he had some not better defined fears about hardware consequences for his machine. There aren’t as i could think of. BTW. seasonal greetings. Hope you get gifts and not charcoal bricks. :wink: (like me getting it all the years LOL, I am the classical “bad boy”).