Looking for N810 Governor CPU Policy Tips
 

I'm looking to get some tips on how other users utilize their governor / CPU Policy in order to gain performance and increase battery life.

I've installed Diablo Turbo, but have not done anything to change governor settings. Does this mean I'm using the default setting --- which would be on demand, right?? I basically understand what on demand, conservative, and performance do, but what does null and powersave do?

Currently I am rotating 2 OEM batteries using an external charger so that when one is drained I shut down my N810 and swap it will the full one. This is basically the only time I ever shut down my N810. The rest of the time I keep it in offline mode whenever possible, and keep bluetooth and GPS turned off virtually all the time. When I'm not using it I keep it in offline mode with the screen and keys locked. So far I'm happy with the battery life, but if I can use the CPU policy to increase it even more than that's all good. As far as performance goes, I'd love to have more if possible when internet browsing.

I'm not great with terminal, but I know there are different GUI options for changing these settings ---- ASUI and Advanced Power specifically. Do they both set CPU policy the same way? Does it matter which one is used? I don't use SSH or VPN so I don't necessarily need all of the functionality of ASUI, but I understand it is more efficient than Advanced Power.

Any tips or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Re: Looking for N810 Governor CPU Policy Tips
 

Unless you're doing something really unusual the default settings should be pretty optimal.

Right.

Powersave is the opposite of performance, ie it locks the CPU to the lowest available frequency. The "null" one is a custom Nokia addition that just registers itself but does nothing. The comments in the source say 'The "null" governor is meant to be used as default during boot until a proper governor is set from userspace.'


You should be getting several days of uptime per charge like that, if not there's likely something else going wrong.

Re: Looking for N810 Governor CPU Policy Tips
 

It doesn't matter which one you use to set it. ASUI does use a lot less memory than adv-power + systemui and I hope it is more efficient but not going to make any claims on that. ;)

Powersave might actually drain the battery faster when running tasks that put the processor under full load since it spends less time idling. It might help if you don't do anything that would normally keep the processor at 400mhz for more than a second. -- Changing from full brightness to very low brightness cuts the battery drain in half. Setting op_dsp to 0 can increase battery life if you play music (other than OGGs) or watch movies (only with media player). Other than that, not running apps that continuously run (games, movies, metalayer-crawler) is the only way to really increase battery life.

ASUI has a battery drain meter that should show 0.4 %/hr (minimum) after your device has been idling for an hour or more with screen off. And if the marker above the ASUI battery applet remains gray when reading and only jumps to yellow when scrolling then you're getting maximum battery life.

Re: Looking for N810 Governor CPU Policy Tips
 

Thanks guys! There was that nagging thought in the back of mind that maybe I was overlooking a possible way to get even better battery life and greater performance. I was considering trying to set the CPU policy to conservative to see if that gave better battery life without hindering performance, or simply using powersave when doing things like reading fbreader books for a couple of hours. However, It sounds like what I'm doing is pretty good, and since I'm getting good battery life right now, I will probably just continue with my current system. Thanks Again!

Re: Looking for N810 Governor CPU Policy Tips
 

One more follow-up question. I still haven't disabled metalayer-crawler --- partially because I use the default media player sometimes, partially because I have been getting good battery life with it on, and partially because I can't find a generally accepted best method for doing this. Is one of these ways better than the other? If not, what is the best way? How can I re-enable it if I want to later?

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=74496&postcount=7

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=164029&postcount=1

I'm not very terminal savvy, so I don't personally know the difference. Thanks Again!

Re: Looking for N810 Governor CPU Policy Tips
 

If you have ASUI installed, even if you aren't using it, you can open asui-settings and toggle metalayer crawler from the services page. The top of that same page also allows you to turn off ASUI and only use SystemUI. The battery applets battery meter and wifi/bt won't work with ASUI disabled but I believe its cpu and drain indicators should still work. So having ASUI installed but not using it could be used for that limited applet functionality and/or the services/mce UI in asui-settings.

The manual way to manage metalayer crawler is to run these commands:And to start/stop it without rebooting