What's New
- iriver Lplayer teardown
- Sipura SPA-841 teardown
- Robotic locomotion
- Finding value in work
- ZFS: the final straw
- Cross-blog pimpage: sixproducts.com
- Running AbstractSpoon ToDoList under Wine
- Aoyue 906 Hot Air Rework Station review
- What I learned from setting up ZFS on my fileserver
- Nokia E65 review: how does it stack up against a 5-year-old Siemens ME45?
- Extending battery life on the Dell XPS M1210
- A quick guide to using MySQL in Python
- Market segments and tactility: the new Apple iPhone
- Cree XR-E LEDs
- What's New block for Drupal
- Google calendar for Sydney adventure and MTB races
- Background Check Antivirus
- Multithreading and performance
- DVI on laptops
- Dell XPS M1210 review
- Improving university for developers
- Automatic Wealth for Grads, by Michael Masterson
- Converting Access databases to PHP/MySQL webapps
- Testing the board
- Assembly
- Making a PCB
- Random bits and pieces
- One weekend, one PCB layout
- Commitment
- Accounting software
- More LTSpice rambling
- The things you find...
- Playing catchup
- Market research
- What type of business?
- Introduction
- New look
- Integrating the H-bridge and its controller
- Using CPLDs and FPGAs in hobby electronics
- A simple logic analyzer
- I2C-based H-bridge controller with PWM
- The virtues of small development teams
- Building a Sumo robot (summary)
- High-power LED mountain bike light
- Optimizing your Start menu for fast program access
- The best batteries in the world...
- Battery-powered USB iPod charge cable that requires no special components
- How to build a simple Luxeon LED bike headlight
Damn Small Linux is
Damn Small Linux is definitely not optimised for low power consumption on modern hardware. The target market for this is the old PCs you've got gathering dust under your desk. Works quite well on my 1996-era Cyrix PR200MX machine with 64MB of RAM, for example. Such machines didn't come with very many fancy pieces of hardware you might want to switch off to save power.
On the other hand, newer cutting-edge Linux releases benefit from recent optimisation work which really is targeted at cutting-edge power-saving hardware, such as the One Laptop Per Child machine. The kernel can now be configured to let the CPU sleep as long as it reasonably can (instead of waking it every 10ms as usual). Unfortunately this alone didn't achieve the power savings you might like, because many applications set 100ms timers and the like to do some brain-dead polling: those broken apps are being progressively fixed.
Measurement of power-related CPU activity due to userspace programs can now be done with the PowerTop utility from Intel's Linux team:
http://www.linuxpowertop.org/