Using powertop to monitor cpu wakeups on a laptop on battery (my case: thinkpad t400), the number of wakeups rises for the "PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad" from less than five to around 400 hundred or more (resulting in a rise in power consumption of 2-3 Watts in most cases -- quite significant on a laptop) when the touchpad is used. How to reproduce: Start powertop as root when the machine is idle and wait for it to stablize it's measurements. Then move the pointer around a lot, and wait for powertop to refresh its readings. The same effect is not seen while typing. The same issue has also been reported elsewhere: Ubuntu bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/194489 Arch linux forum thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=486690 As the same appears on different distributions and kernel versions, it is likely to be caused by the driver, although I can't be sure. My system specs: Lenovo Thinkpad T400 Synaptics touchpad (part of an UltraNav) Arch Linux x86_64 version 0.99.3 of xf86-input-synaptics
Created attachment 22229 [details] Output from powerto -d with touchpad movement
Created attachment 22230 [details] Output from powerto -d without touchpad movement
From the original bugreport: "powertop reports a huge amoun of wakeups from the touchpad. Notice that this is independent of the synaptics driver being loaded or not. I get the exact same results with an out of the box xorg.conf where the touchpad is recognized as a plain mouse. The screenshot shows the problem." This is a kernel issue, not one of the X.Org synaptics driver -> NOTOURBUG.
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