On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 11:11 AM, Matthew Miller
<mattdm@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> * Hardware compatibility just works. (Wifi, sound, HDMI, graphics,
> suspend, etc.)
Also in the HN thread that came up more than once, and comes up on
users@ and forums often, is power management. This might be a bigger
problem on some hardware than others. My Macs are always hot and run
fans even when idle - I suspect the GPU runs in a non-idle state by
default - and also results in awful battery life.
<SNIP>
Owen Taylor blogged about a few things that would be of use here (at least as far as GNOME apps go).
This discusses some perf tests run as part of CI.
This is a standalone gui that offers a few different battery tests (one is opening a browser to a page(Google, iirc), another creates a simple text doc using gedit, and lastly (again, iirc) there is the baseline test which just measures idle power at the desktop for a fixed period). I believe he mentioned that he wanted to include those battery tests as part of the GNOME CI.
I'm not sure how extensible this app is, and I'm pretty sure this is targeting X only libraries, but it would seem to point a way forward.
On the Firefox side they've a page that addresses this issue and offer a few solutions (at one point, perhaps they still do, they regularly ran tests to check for power use).
I'll also mention that osx includes a panel, in the system monitor app, that will last and blame apps based on energy use. In the same app osx also offers a sysprof-like tool that allows you to see what calls are happening (since I'd imagine that it's using dtrace it may offer a great deal more than that but I've not dug into it).
So, this might be a way to play the bar for users who are experiencing issues to provide devs with some rather more actionable data than "my computer is running weird/hot/slowly/away_from_me".
Best/Liam