Is Linux Power Management Getting Better Or Worse?

The ThinkPad R52 continues to do well on the first and only alpha release of Fedora Laughlin, but the T60 and T61 continue to suffer quite severely when it comes to running the PostMark disk benchmark. Fedora 13 though on these two Lenovo notebooks was also bad and at their highest power consumption rate up until running Fedora 14 Alpha.

When looking at the PostMark results, for the ThinkPad R52 and ThinkPad T60 the best disk performance was found in Fedora 12 while with the T61 it was in Fedora 13. Since those milestones, however, the EXT4 performance has degraded in Fedora due to upstream kernel changes to the EXT4 kernel module in an attempt to improve the data's security as we have talked about in many other articles. With all three notebooks, the PostMark performance dropped more between Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 Alpha, but again it might be partially attributed to kernel debugging options that are temporarily enabled by Red Hat.

With the x264 battery performance the results were much the same with the ThinkPad R52 having the lowest power consumption rate under Fedora 14 Alpha, but for the ThinkPad T60 and ThinkPad T61 it's hit a high point in Laughlin.