Re: silent PC vs. emacs

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

  >     IMHO DTRT in case of running on battery power would mean turning off
  >     blink-cursor-mode, otherwise emacs wakes up a couple of times a second
  >     just to blink the cursor.
  > 
  > Could someone try this experiment?  Does the laptop burn power faster
  > when Emacs is running and blinking the cursor?

I am not sure how easy it is to do such an experiment. The OLPC/Fedora
people are working on eliminating application wakeups in order to save
power. I cite here from one of the bug reports about this:

   "We're working with RH engineers on a tickless idle kernel, which
   has the goal of reducing power and hypervisor loads when the system
   is idle. This is done by removing the regular ticking clock when
   the system is idle, so that in theory long sleep periods are
   possible for the hardware (or hypervisor). The kernel portion of
   this works great, however when using a gnome desktop there are many
   however when using a gnome desktop there are many timers going off
   all the time for userspace, so many that the actual savings are not
   so great (about 250 events per second)."

Given that so many applications wake up so often, what emacs does
might not be measurable at this point, but it might make a difference
in the future.

(If anyone is interested in more details, the bug tracking this
 activity is:
 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=204906 )