[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#641845: upowerd: upowerd wastes power by writing to disk too often

[Shannon Dealy]

Package: upower
Version: 0.9.5-5
Severity: normal
File: upowerd


I was surprized to find that the reason my laptop disk keeps spinning up
is the "upowerd" power management daemon.  It is writing to its history files
at least a couple times a minute.  It seems to me that any program involved
in power management should be more careful in its use of power.  Ideally,
it would only push its data to disk when the disk is already spun up, possibly
with a maximum time limit of 20 minutes or when some maximum amount of buffered
data is reached, whichever comes first.  Alternatively, it should allow for
at least several minutes of data to buffer before flushing to disk.  Even
better would be if whichever of the above is implemented were configurable
(buffer size and time limit) in a run-time configuration file or as a command
line option.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.2
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'stable-updates')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.36-trunk-686-bigmem (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages upower depends on:
ii  dbus                   1.2.24-4+squeeze1 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libc6                  2.11.2-10         Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdbus-1-3            1.2.24-4+squeeze1 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2       0.88-2.1          simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.24.2-1          The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgudev-1.0-0         164-3             GObject-based wrapper library for 
ii  libimobiledevice1      1.0.2-1           Library for communicating with the
ii  libplist1              1.3-2             Library for handling Apple binary 
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.96-4            PolicyKit Authorization API
ii  libupower-glib1        0.9.5-5           abstraction for power management -
ii  libusb-1.0-0           2:1.0.8-2         userspace USB programming library
ii  udev                   164-3             /dev/ and hotplug management daemo

Versions of packages upower recommends:
ii  pm-utils                      1.3.0-3    utilities and scripts for power ma
ii  policykit-1                   0.96-4     framework for managing administrat

upower suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information