Using powertop I found out that syndaemon wakes up the CPU very often. It uses a polling interval of 20ms. The patch at http://support.zenwalk.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12979 increases this time to 200ms which should be sufficient. Maybe this could be added to the ebuild with an "incpoll"-useflag? Reproducible: Always
The patch at the Novell bugzilla allows for a configurable polling interval, which would be a better option. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=386709
Created attachment 160725 [details] emerge info The Novell patch works well and with a setting of syndaemon -m 500 I can lower the number of wakeups from it. I tried this on x86 architecture by applying the patch to the synaptics-0.14.6 ebuild.
Created attachment 160726 [details] Novell patch
+*synaptics-0.14.6-r3 (30 Jul 2008) + + 30 Jul 2008; Samuli Suominen <drac@gentoo.org> + +files/synaptics-0.14.6-configurable_polling_interval.patch, + +synaptics-0.14.6-r3.ebuild: + Apply configurable polling interval patch from Novell so that syndaemon + doesn't wake up CPU so often. Bug 216679, thanks to Roland Tapken, Thomas + Kirchner and Krister Bäckman.