[GLLUG] Re: APM Daemon in Mandrake

[Matt Graham]

On Monday 31 December 2001 03:01, you wrote:
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Eh?  Did this get stuck in the queue for 3 weeks, or is your date 
screwed up?

> My brother-in-law is running Mandrake 8.0 and he had his PC over for
> some tweaking the other day.  At one point, I noticed that the CPU
> meter was pegged at around 100%.  A quick check showed that the
> 'kapm-idled' process was hogging the "lion's share" by far.
[snip]

kapm-idled is supposed to do that.  Its purpose in life is to run when 
nothing else is running and issue HLT instructions to an x86 processor. 
 Since executing a HLT instruction takes much less electrical power 
than executing any other instruction, the result is a net power savings.

Lots of other people noticed this too, and some of them freaked out.  
It looks like more recent kernels have played some tricks with the 
reporting of CPU stats for that particular part of the kernel, as I'm 
running 2.4.16 and kapm-idled is consuming 0% of the CPU.  (Yes, I shut 
down the distributed.net client, and though KDE2 and Mozilla can be 
hogs, they are sucking ~6% of the CPU together.)  Upshot:  Don't worry 
about it.  If the stats cause you alarm, upgrade your kernel--probably 
a good idea anyway, Mandrake 8.0 was using something from before the 
2.4 VM got straightened out IIRC.

-- 
   One of the most overlooked advantages to computers is... If they do
   foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little.
   -- Joe Martin
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see