PowerTOP: Remove hard coded values for C and P states

Binary package hint: powertop

This bug is being reported for PowerTOP (v1.13) on MAVERICK (10.10 release).

The problem with current PowerTOP tool is that it has hard coded values for P and C states. Because of this it doesn't show correct and complete information on non-intel architectures (like ARM) which may support more of these states than what intel has. Being part of the Linaro Power Management Work Group, one of the mission we have is to make PowerTOP work well on ARM SoCs too.

The patch suggested here removes these hard coded values and makes display subsystem of powertop aware of the actual number of C and P states available on the system and show them accordingly (i.e. reserve corresponding lines in the ncurses window to display these states, and also show all the states in the "dump" mode too). This change will make PowerTOP work well on ALL the architectures, and not just on x86.

The patch has been posted upstream and the maintainer has promised to look into it and reply back. Its in his one of the lower priority ToDo item. But, for us (Linaro) its of high priority, since PowerTOP on many ARM devices won't work (eg. on OMAP3, where number of C states can be upto 9 !).

Here is the link to the post : http://www.bughost.org/pipermail/power/2010-August/001961.html

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: powertop 1.11+git20091208-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.39-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Sep 1 15:23:21 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_IN
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: powertop