powertop in Rawhide

the Fedora 9 distribution to be released at the end of this month, already looks promising on how it will play nice with the power-saving levels of the CPU. Independantly on the amount of power consumption of each element that constitutes a laptop, the longer of processor can stay in a deep power-saving state, without being woke up by the OS, the less it will consume power, and the longer the battery will last.

The EeePC can reach the average of 5 wakeup per second, with gnome running, and everything idle on the machine, usb modules unloaded, and wifi driver unloaded too. So the processor can stay on average 200ms in its deeper power-saving state (C3 in this case), which is very good, see the screenshot here.

The linux kernel made huge progresses in this area, if we remember that not long ago, the fixed timer interrupt, generated between 100 and 1000 wakeups per second by itself, even when the CPU was idle.