On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Stevie O wrote:
>
> > At 09:07 PM 2/3/2002 -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> >
> >> Rather than a signal, it should be a file descriptor of some sort, so
> >> one can select() etc on it. Personally I can't imagine polling would
> >> take any appreciable amount of resources, though.
> >
> >
> > Windows 95 polls the cd-rom drive for autorun.
> > It kills laptop batteries REAL quick.
> > CPU & memory aren't the only resources...
> >
>
> Does it spin up the CD-ROM doing so?
>
> -hpa
Probably it doesn't, but just having the cpu be non-idle when it could
otherwise be idle does add up over time. In linux, polling the cdrom
*seems* inexpensive enough, but if you look at 'top' it seems to average
out to like 1-2% cpu time! (Ok, these stats aren't super-accurate,
they're just from running 'top' with the kde autorun tool running).
[Admitedly, the autorun tool is written kind of strangely (it does one
redundant ioctl, plus it wait()s on its children constantly rather than
installing a signal handler), but still.. it would be nice to get those
extra cycles for quake3 or wolfenstein...]
-Calin
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 07 2002 - 21:00:40 EST