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Interestingly, the thing that drains my battery most is running a VM in virtualbox, even when it's doing nothing. I'm not really surprised by this, but it woul
by Intermernet 11y ago
Interestingly, the thing that drains my battery most is running a VM in virtualbox, even when it's doing nothing.
I'm not really surprised by this, but it would be interesting to see how much Virtualbox hooks into the power-saving functionality on the host machine, and if this can be optimized. I'd have thought that a VM that's pretty much idle would be able to somehow utilize the host computer's power saving methods. Maybe it can, but I haven't enabled it in the VM settings... Any tips?
- fpoling 11y agoIf you want to prolong battery life with VM, use Parallels or Fusion, not Virtual Box [1]. I suppose VB just does not implement power saving hooks or, perhaps, implementing them brings too much complexity into the software. [1] http://www.tekrevue.com/2015-vm-benchmarks-parallels-11-vs-fusion-8/13/ http://www.tekrevue.com/2015-vm-benchmarks-parallels-11-vs-f...
- tachion 11y agoOr, if you want even longer battery life, use Veertu instead Parallels or Fusion ;)
- fpoling 11y agoIs there a benchmark that shows power consumption savings from Veertu in a realistic settings? In any case, until Veertu support USB devices it is not much use for me.
- tmaly 11y agoI just use homebrew and skip the virtualization all together. I only use 2-3% of my battery while riding the train and working for 90 minutes.
- coldtea 11y agoWhat does homebrew have to do with virtualization? Homebrew is not for replicating a deployment environment in your work machine.
- tmaly 11y agoI happen to use Go and a Makefile to build my servers, and my deployment process works on osx and linux, so I end up not having to have to replicate an environment for development.
- coldtea 11y agoEven so, Go and a makefile won't account for filesystem differences, databases, services like cron, etc in a deployment environment.
- tmaly 11y agoI looked in to Docker on osx, but I am waiting for their latest beta Docker for Mac to come out. I think something like this with a lower learning curve would be more ideal for virtualization. It lowers the feedback loop on experimenting. I run Postgresql on one of my VPS machines, and I dread having to upgrade it all the time.
- ghshephard 11y agoYou understand why a casual reader, when encountering the statement, "I use 3% of my battery in 90 minutes on my laptop" will raise an eyebrow, right? The extrapolation to total battery life is a little mind boggling.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoKVM on Linux has similar support for efficient idle: if the guest OS inside the VM handles idle sensibly, KVM itself will idle, allowing the host OS to idle.