From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG  Thu Jan 12 08:45:36 2006
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From: "Darren Pilgrim" <darren.pilgrim@bitfreak.org>
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Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:45:26 -0800
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Subject: RE: powerd effectiveness
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I guess I should chime in here:

1.6GHz Pentium M notebook.  Everything enabled: ACPI, USB, wireless,
bluetooth.  powerd_flags=3D"-i 100 -r 25"  The backlight is on =
continuously in
FreeBSD.  Lag is hard to notice, since it takes <100 ms to make the
100->1600 MHz step, but I can see brief lag if the machine is completely
idle and I do something to eat the CPU that provides an immediate visual
indicator of churn rate, like run an animation.

Battery life:

FreeBSD, powerd running: 4.5-5 hours
FreeBSD, powerd not running: ~2 hours

For comparison:

Windows XP, aggressive power-saving: ~3 hours

As for heat, the surface hot spots all stay significantly cooler with =
powerd
running.  I don't have working system health stats in FreeBSD, so
quantitative heat reports aren't possible.