Comment 41 for bug 524281

I applied that patch to the 2.6.34 amd64 kernel and it does reduce the load balancing wakeups somewhat on my dual core PC. It went from around 50 per second to 35 after the patch (and that's running Skype and iwlagn, which average 10 and 15 wakeups per second respectively - the load balancing wakeups are higher when more things are running: when I am not running X, the load balancing wakeups are much fewer (under 10)).

I also tried compiling a 2.6.34 kernel *without* multi-core support for my 32 bit single core PC, and it does reduce the number of load balancing wakeups (although to my surprise they still happen).

@Flávio Etrusco (comment 15): it looks like your nvidia driver is causing a lot of wakeups, which you can fix with the xorg.conf option:

Option "OnDemandVBlankInterrupts" "True"

and if you're worried about power usage, the nvidia driver defaults to max performance, which means max power usage. You can put an entry in xorg.conf that makes it reduce performance (and power) when on battery but still give max performance on AC for gaming, etc (see eg http://linux.aldeby.org/nvidia-powermizer-powersaving.html for details).