powertop repeatedly suggests iwl3945 power savings

[Jeffrey Baker]

Binary package hint: powertop

On Karmic (Alpha 2, x86_64) using powertop package 1.11-1, powertop repeatedly suggests the following:

Suggestion: Enable wireless power saving mode by executing the following command:
  echo 5 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/0000:03:00.0/power_level
This will sacrifice network performance slightly to save power.

However, striking the "W" key to accept this suggestions doesn't change the setting, and powertop suggests this action endlessly. Powertop continues to suggest this action even if the power setting is already "5".

I believe the problem is that reading from the power_level file previously returned a single number, and now returns a long string.

Before: 5
Now: SYSTEM:auto MODE:fixed INDEX:5

Perhaps powertop should use iwconfig to interrogate the power setting instead of relying on sysfs.

[nathan (ferrisn)]

I am experiencing the same thing on Jaunty i386 with powertop 1.11-1 and an iwl3945 card

[Jeffrey Baker (jwbaker)]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 11:44 AM, nathan<email address hidden> wrote:
> I am experiencing the same thing on Jaunty i386 with powertop 1.11-1 and
> an iwl3945 card

Upstream has incorporated some patches to fix this, but not released
yet. Perhaps they could be incorporated into the package for karmic.