pbbuttons-users

man page error, high CPU load, 3.* sources patch

[<mas...@gm...>]

Hi,

* please notice my problem with high CPU load here:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7114180.html#7114180

First of all after the 0.8 configuration migration there is still an error in the man-page:

Even the latest man-page is wrong here:

Quote:
> autorescan = [yes | no] (default: yes)	

The group must be [SYSTEM] and the setting must be *false* and not *no*. Now its really disabled according to pbbcmd.

The standard pbbuttonsd.cnf does not match the latest specification. I'm not sure if this is generated by the distribution.

Then I still have the issue with high CPU load on a PB G4, eventhough most is disabled such as autorescan, NETLoad* CPULoad* and *Autoadj*
Any hint what to try else?


* Then please take a look at https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7063064.html
I submitted a patch there for the 3.* sources.
I also think about porting the pbbuttonsd functionality to the common pm-utils, which does most of the things quite equally.

Is this project still alive? The was no submit and mailing list traffic the last years. If so I feel no need to migrate to pm-utils if we can keep the old ppc books and also new Macbooks alive with pbbuttonsd.


Regards,
Massimo

Re: man page error, high CPU load, 3.* sources patch

[Matthias G. <mat...@us...>]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:46:22 +0200
mas...@gm... wrote:

Hi Massimo,
Thanks for your mail. You are right, the project is not very active anymore
and even I changed to an non-apple laptop in the meantime.

Anyway, I corrected the errors in the man pages and scripts you discovered,
in the upstream code. Who knows what this would be good for. :-)

I had a look at you high cpu load problem. Even I changed to glib in version
0.8.x not everthing is event driven. Autorescan causes a lot of cpu load, as
you already discovered.

To find out more it would be the best to compile with --enable-debug. Have a look
into debug.h. You can enable a lot of different debug information. PEEP_TIMER
might be of special interest for you. Start the daemon in a console without
letting it detach and watch the output.

> I also think about porting the pbbuttonsd functionality to the common pm-utils, which does most of the things quite equally.
> 
> Is this project still alive? The was no submit and mailing list traffic
> the last years. If so I feel no need to migrate to pm-utils if we can keep
> the old ppc books and also new Macbooks alive with pbbuttonsd.

Powermac users with a PPC CPU are a distinguishing species. New features are
no longer needed and the download numbers are around 2 per month, and I think
this are robots, not knowing what they are doing. ;-)

To transfer all of pbbuttonsd functionality to pm-utils might by tricky because
you need some special tools to tweak the hardware but you could combine both
which a special script dispatcher. In this case you get at least rid of the rather
outdated scripts of pbbuttons.

 Best Regards
   Matthias


-- 
Matthias Grimm <mat...@us...>

Re: man page error, high CPU load, 3.* sources patch

[<mas...@gm...>]

> Datum: Mon, 13 Aug 2012 20:45:53 +0200

> Thanks for your mail. You are right, the project is not very active
> anymore
> and even I changed to an non-apple laptop in the meantime.

I often thought about a change, so I dropped my old iBook but still keep the Powerbook since it is alive again with a new battery.
I often thought about a ppc optimized glibc using more of the altivec feature, like OSX already did, and which is the cause why Linux on ppc feels slower.
I tried to discuss glibc replacements here:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-861090.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-861947.html

Anyway, as you said, the ppc community is decreasing. But now with a amd64 crosscompiler I go on with the Powerbook for a while...
So we can stay with pbbuttonsd and fix at least the bugs (remember to adapt for 3.x sources with the patch I provided).
 
> Anyway, I corrected the errors in the man pages and scripts you
> discovered,
> in the upstream code. Who knows what this would be good for. :-)

Thanks, if released I'll forward that to the Gentoo ebuild maintainers.

> I had a look at you high cpu load problem. Even I changed to glib in ...

I'll do some debugging on my own and let you know.

> Powermac users with a PPC CPU are a distinguishing species.

This is right, there will be no new devices in the future. Though there are also some PPC around in Linux TV settop-boxes and Playstations. But this is not focussed by the pbbuttonsd

And so it is maybe not worth to start this task:

> To transfer all of pbbuttonsd functionality to pm-utils might by tricky ...

Best regards,
Massimo