Comment 32 for bug 760131

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Matthew Hessel (matt-hessel) wrote :

looks like part of this was noticed back in September.

http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/9/30/100

I took the Natty kernel sources and default config and manually applied the diffs from that thread.

the load balance thread that keeps waking the kernel drops significantly when idle. - went from 300 or so wakeups per second minmum on my Core 2 duo laptop to about 30 at minimum.

I'm no expert, but from reading the thread, it looks like the tickless patches in the last few kernels combined with the SMP code causes excessive ticking in the kernel when there is no work to do, so it can't effectively idle at lower sleep states.

I haven't tested this, but single CPU/single core machines might not be affected by this, as there is no function for the load balancing code when there is only one core.