[maemo-developers] Quality assurance of "stable" software: my battery drained in few hours

[From: Ian Stirling]

Jan Knutar wrote:
>> Doesn't the userland carry some sort of process monitoring, killing
>> malignant processes ? If not, we should develop something like this
>> for MeeGo.
> 
> It's pretty hard to find out what's eating the battery on N900. First 
> you have decide that the battery is being consumed too fast. The default 
> charge meter occasionally realizes it's very wrong, and rapidly 
> readjusts itself, giving potential misreadings there. bq27200 certainly 
> helps there, though there's no "production quality" software available 
> to use it yet. Nokia Energy Profiler still shines with its absence ;)

I'm trying to develop something like this.
An energy profiler.

The ideal would be 'top' - sorted by power use.
But this is hard. :)

Initial stages are looking like something rather more modest.
Basically porportion out to every job that ran in a measured period a 
best guess at a 'fair' proportion of the power use during that period.

Further break this down by subsystem.
It's not 'fair' for example to count the power usage of xterm as very 
high, due to the backlight/display being on, when that's the users fault.