{"id":1277,"date":"2007-09-05T14:55:48","date_gmt":"2007-09-05T12:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/lce-power-consumption-and-version-control-systems\/"},"modified":"2007-09-05T14:55:48","modified_gmt":"2007-09-05T12:55:48","slug":"lce-power-consumption-and-version-control-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/lce-power-consumption-and-version-control-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"LCE, power consumption and version control systems?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m travelling back from LinuxConf.EU<\/a> right now. The
\nconference was very well organised, taking place in the beautiful Cambridge. My talk went pretty
\nwell. For me it was the first time I relied on KDE 4 not letting me down, I did the presentation
\nfrom a KDE 4 desktop, using okular. Glad to tell you it didn’t let me down. :-)
\n
\nMost of the talks were very technical and largely related to kernel-like stuff. No wonder that,
\nthere were quite some kernel developers around, some of which I got to give me some insight what we
\nas desktop and their upstream can do better.<\/p>\n

\nMost notably, I’ve talked with Arjen van der Ven about power consumption. Arjen advised to do
\nregular checks with powertop and see who’s the worst offender in waking up the CPU. He mentioned
\nthat 2 wakeups per second is a good value and that we should be aiming for that. (Not having a
\nrecent enough kernel on my notebook right now, I can’t check how KDE 4 does with respect to that
\nright now.) He also mentioned that the worst offenders are not-aligned timers, so if we use timers
\nat all, they should all be aligned with each other so that multiple timer events don’t wake up the
\nCPU more often than necessary. I understand that there’s work in plasma going on to accomplish that,
\nand that there’s also a patch for Qt lying on a desk somewhere in Oslo which does this for the whole
\nof Qt. Would be nice if that could make it in quickly. Arjen noted that there’s also related work in
\nglibc going on.<\/p>\n

\nOn monday night at Duxford<\/a> Imperial War Museum, I did an interview
\nwith Linux User & Developer Magazine<\/a>. Make sure you don’t
\nmiss the next edition if you want to read it.<\/p>\n

\nYesterday, I chatted with Linus about version control systems, especially the difference between git
\nand subversion. Important aspects are that git does not do well with binary data (especially not if
\nit changes frequently), it’s just not designed for that (no surprise here). There also seem to be a
\ncouple of performance issues when importing very large repositories (such as KDE).
\n
\nMy major gripes on the whole VCS issue are the following (take git as an example for any distributed
\nVCS here):<\/p>\n