What's the best filesystem battery-wise for laptops?

[Bob Raymond]

Net Llama! wrote:

> Bob Raymond wrote:
>
>> This question may have been asked before, and I apologize if it has, but
>> my friend has a problem with battery life on his laptop.  He only 
>> gets about
>> fifty minutes to an hour in Linux, while in WindeXP, it's more like two
>> hours.  One thing I notice in Linux is that there's a lot more HD useage
>> going on.  Could this be because of the ReiserFS that's on there now?
>
>
> More likely because his system isn't properly tuned, or he's doing 
> things that are I/O intensive.  I've give 512MB of swap, other wise, 
> he's going to use up all the physical memory & swap, and then the 
> system is going to grind to a hault, as it keeps paging in & out of 
> memory.

I would suggest quitting KDE, but he's coming from the world of Windows, 
and even now hasn't quite figured out the possibilities of say, the 
right mouse button, the command line, etc.  Of course, he also uses 
KMail and Konqueror, but they really aren't that big.

>
>>
>> He's coming over Sunday so I can install SuSE 8.0 (to replace 7.3) and I
>> noticed XFS is one of the options.  I know from personal experience that
>> it is faster than ReiserFS, but how good is it on the batteries, or is
>> the filesystem even the problem?
>
>
> The filesystem has little to no effect.  I'd wager good money that 
> windozeXP is not spinning up his HD to 5400rpm, and is halving his CPU 
> clock speed in order to save power.  apm can definitely help with this 
> stuff in Linux (as could the BIOS, possibly), however the question 
> comes down to whether he wants performance or battery life.
>
> Something else to consider is his kernel, which i really doubt was 
> optimized for a mobile system, or his CPU. 

Actually, I downloaded the 2.4.18 sources when they came out and 
optimized it for P-4.  This is not a mobile P-4 processor, either.  He 
bought the system about a month and a half before the P4-M's came out. 
 I made sure to choose only his hardware in the kernel.  For some 
reason, whenever the APM does its trick with the screen, X gets frozen 
as well.  Could that be the current low level of support for the Radeon 
7500?  This is the first X release to support it, and the GPU is 
slightly different from the standard Radeon that has kernel support.

I don't think WindeXP is about to halve the clock speed or anything of 
the sort on a desktop P-4, as that is only done in the BIOS.  But it may 
be screwing with the HD.

All he does on the road is check e-mail through the Cell phone (those 
3Com XJack modems sure are nice gadgets).  Most of the time the thing is 
plugged in, but he'd rather not have to quit working one hour down the road.

>
>
>>
>>
>>
>> specs:
>>
>> Sager NP5620
>> Intel P4 1.8ghz
>> ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
>> 30GB 5400 RPM HD,
>> Part. table:
>>
>> 8mb /boot /dev/hda1
>
>
> That's a wee bit small.  I'd give it at least 15MB.
>
I'll change it, then.

>
>> 15GB (approx). / /dev/hda2
>> 256mb (approx). swap /dev/hda3
>> 14GB (approx). /windoze/C /dev/hda3
>>
>> 256mb PC2100 DDR
>
>
Thanks,

Bob Raymond