Bug 190068

Summary:	Powertweak - Add Global Options
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Scott Couston <scott>
Component:	YaST2	Assignee:	Stanislav Brabec <sbrabec>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Stanislav Visnovsky <visnov>
Severity:	Enhancement
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	suse-beta
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i586
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	exported directrories by entering ip

Description Scott Couston 2006-07-02 09:07:18 UTC

Add following Global features for the not so advanced user, however preserve current settings for advanced user.

Based upon Current RAM

1.Optimise RAM for High System Cache- Least for Applications - File Server Only
2.Optimise RAM for Medium System Cache- Balance of Memory - Greater File Service
3.Optimise RAM for Low System Cache- Greatest Applications - Least File Service
4.Optimise RAM for System Defaults- Based on Current RAM

Based upon Current Hard Disk Space (HDD)

1.Optimise HDD for High System Cache- Least for Applications – File Server Only
2.Optimise HDD for Medium System Cache- Balance of Memory - Greater File Service
3.Optimise HDD for Low System Cache- Greatest Applications - Least File Service
4.Optimise HDD for System Defaults - Based on Current HDD

Notes
Optimisation based upon Current RAM will re-asses Current RAM without respect to HDD capacity. - Useful if you install RAM after system installed.

Optimisation based upon Current HDD will re-asses Current HDD space AND RAM and make adjustments accordingly.

There are 3 categories to facilitate the settings of Cache Buffers, Disk Read time, Dirty Cache Buffers, Read Times, Write times, Flush times and Kernel changes...and other  dependant settings that can be reassessed based on current RAM or HDD.  You may wish to create another level and be more descriptive about global changes, for which you have derived changes as permitted above, but not known to a user.

The hard part is coming up with what changes you will make to system to effect these standard levels for the user without the user having interment knowledge of these settings available for change.

Both will re-asses RAM and allocated HDD that may have been added or increased after initial installation.

P.S Not happy with description but you get the idea.

Comment 1 Christian Boltz 2006-07-02 16:07:38 UTC

If I get it right, you are talking about setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness ;-)

Comment 2 Scott Couston 2006-07-03 01:19:37 UTC

Sure, that makes it easy, however I think you can throw in
net/ipv4/neigh/*
net/core/optmem_max

The more you think about it the more settings that can be altered...
Hard Part for you is to set out which combination of settings to alter...;-)

Comment 3 Scott Couston 2006-11-14 14:50:38 UTC

Created attachment 105166 [details]
exported directrories by entering ip

Comment 4 Christian Boltz 2006-11-14 23:55:45 UTC

Scott, your screenshot doesn't look related to this bugreport...

BTW: Why did you put the JPG in a tar.gz file?

Comment 5 Scott Couston 2006-11-15 00:21:43 UTC

I have no idea...I probably had too many tabs open at the same time. Please delete reference.

Kind Regards

Comment 6 Stanislav Brabec 2007-04-18 14:03:28 UTC

Powertweak was designed to work with kernel 2.0 and 2.2 and harware, which was
actual in years 1998-2000. It is unmaintained in upstream for six years.

It causes many problems for program, which tries to modify important values of
kernel, which changed a lot since these years. This bug is only a small side
effect.

These facts implies decision to deprecate powertweak with SLES10 SP1 and drop
for OpenSUSE 10.3 and SLES11.

If there will be a strong need for similar application, there can be created a
new applications with similar functions.

Rationale in details:

- Unmaitained since 2001.
- It has no tweaking support for hardware manufactured after 2001.
- It has no support for kernel parameters added after kernel 2.2.
- It has never been tested with newer kernels.
- It has no support for device hotplugging.
- Designed for deprecated gtk1.
- There are unfixed bugs.
- There are hardware specific crashes.

Other bugs: bug 36824, bug 151134, bug 179761, bug 171481, bug 190068, bug 176807 (many others were
fixed).

Several other bugs are obvious:
- glib critical warnings
- gtk critical warnings if daemon is not running (causes crash in GNOME betas)
- Kernel\Linux: At least 26 items here is incorrectly displayed.
- Kernel\Information: Incorrectly displayed.
- File->Load state: Reports only "Not implemented yet"

Only minor part of powertweak is still really usable:

Fine tuning of some kernel parameters:
It can be done via simple script doing echo "foo" >/(proc|sys)/foo

Fine tuning of some network kernel parameters for non-hotplugged devices:
It can be again done via simple script doing echo "foo" >/(proc|sys)/foo.
In this case, it needs some logic to know names of actual network interfaces.