UPower 1.90.4 Fixes Excessive Disk Writes & High CPU Usage

UPower as the abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux systems and allowing various battery / power supply features is out with a new feature update.

UPower is very useful for the modern Linux desktop for this evolution from DeviceKit-Power and before that HAL. With UPower 1.90.4 are some more additions that are beneficial to Linux laptop and desktop users.

Most notable, UPower 1.90.4 fixes an issue around excessive disk writes and CPU usage. This bug report from four months ago noted high disk writes from the UPower daemon and that in the period of 12 hours around 7.5GB of data was written to disk... UPower using excessive disk writes and also CPU usage was then addressed via this merge that landed last month. The fix is to ignore unknown events from devices and preventing writing the history item with unknown status to the file. In particular for some Logitech devices as well as other Bluetooth devices, UPower could end up seeing an unknown battery event every few seconds. In turn this caused lots of these unknown events to build up within the history files of UPower stored on the disk. So to avoid filling up user storage devices and also excessive CPU use, UPower 1.90.4 better handles things.

UPower 1.90.4 also stops guessing any unknown battery as a power supply, continues supporting lid handling for laptops, and contains other fixes.

For those rolling their own UPower build as opposed to letting your Linux distribution take care of it can find the new sources up on FreeDesktop.org GitLab.