Another Major Linux Power Regression Spotted

The third test is running the OpenArena game from the Mobility Radeon X300 kernel with the old Mesa and DDX user-space (meaning no DRI2/KMS/page-flipping, etc, plus KMS was disabled in each kernel via nomodeset) and still only upgrading the kernel. When running this OpenGL game on the different kernels, the power consumption again goes up with Linux 2.6.35 from 26.2 to 28.5 Watts (+9%) and with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel it goes up to 29.9 Watts (+5%).

When applying system memory pressure via the Stream memory benchmark, the regression persisted. The delta actually increased with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel to being a 17.9% setback and another 5% with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel.