Arch Linux

And this is not just recommended by the PowerTOP author, but by the Kernel Maintainers. Here is the corresponding Commit Message:



Mark CONFIG_IRQBALANCE as not recommended any more. It eats too much
power, and better solutions are available in userspace.

Signed-off-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>

---
commit 2665f7971b5b97830b028308553a78a95c131988
tree e1782cceebfb5900373469c0043d113de88f861f
parent f5085f6ea1c5771708c44a4a42ee217e760ff4a0
author Pavel <pavel@amd.ucw.cz> Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:56:15 +0200
committer Pavel <pavel@amd.ucw.cz> Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:56:15 +0200

arch/i386/Kconfig | 9 ++++++---
1 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/i386/Kconfig b/arch/i386/Kconfig
index eba2d88..10f3c38 100644
--- a/arch/i386/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/i386/Kconfig
@@ -779,10 +779,13 @@ config EFI
config IRQBALANCE
bool "Enable kernel irq balancing"
depends on SMP && X86_IO_APIC
- default y
+ default n
help
- The default yes will allow the kernel to do irq load balancing.
- Saying no will keep the kernel from doing irq load balancing.
+ Saying yes will allow the kernel to do irq load balancing;
+ but it generates too many CPU wakeups, eating power, and
+ is better done in userspace.
+
+ Say N.

# turning this on wastes a bunch of space.
# Summit needs it only when NUMA is on

I support this request. The userspace daemon is the recommended utility for this task. It is now in AUR (unsupported), so maybe promoting it to at least the community repo if possible would be a good way to solve this issue.

This code isn't even in the kernel anymore- it has been removed. We should definitely disable this.

Note that I added the "irqbalance" package to extra yesterday for both architectures.