Green Linux to attack power consumption

The Linux Foundation has formed a "Green Linux" initiative that will focus on reducing the open source operating system's power consumption.

The group is meeting next week in Ottowa, Canada where it is expected to set development priorities. The initiative was formed last week at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that took place at Google's Silicon Valley campus. The event attracted 230 individual open source developers and employees for companies backing the Foundation including Novell, Red Hat and IBM.

The Linux Foundation promotes the standardization and technology collaboration that furthers the open source operating system. The group is backed by a group of commercial companies and is the official employer of Linus Torvalds.

Power consumption is a growing concern for mobile devices that seek to optimize battery life, but the group will also address the desktop and server spaces.

Although hardware is an obvious area for developers to cut power consumption, large gains can also be made with software.

Intel for instance has released a tool called PowerTOP that allows laptop users to monitor the power consumption of their Linux system. It tracks which applications wake up the processor from its low power sleep mode, allowing users to stop using certain power hungry applications or tweak them.

Early results have yielded a 1 hour increase in battery life on some notebook computers, but the technology can also benefit desktop systems and servers.

The Collaboration Summit furthermore highlighted efforts to improve the accessibility for disabled users and its work on the iAccessible2 standard. Delegates furthermore discussed efforts to build hardware drivers, for which the Foundation has recently formed the Linux Driver Project.
Source :http://www.vnunet.com