acpid and top

[Kent Borg]

Seeing as how my emacs question was so successful, I decided to try
again.  Why does acpid take up so many of my computrons?

Look at this line from top:

 5958 root      25   0  1348   80 1176 R 97.6  0.0  85:17.23 acpid

This is the top item, it is using 97.6% of the CPU, which seems a lot,
but the priority is 25, which, if I understand Linux, is a very low
priority.  It is being an idle task?  Why?  And what happens when I
get one of those CPU throttling daemons running on my notebook to save
battery?  Will this trick the daemon into thinking that the CPU really
is needed and keep the CPU at full speed?

I recently "emerged" acpid on my Gentoo notebook because I got
software suspend working and want to power switch to initiate the
suspend.  

Software suspend is cool. It isn't as fast as the BIOS RAM suspend I
used on my old Vaio,l but it also doesn't use battery power to sleep.
(If I get a second battery I can swap batteries without having to hack
some kind of keeper battery kludge.)  I have only been playing with
swsusp since yesterday evening but it looks pretty stable on the
newest 2.6.7-gentoo-r3 kernel.  The ipw2100 0.53 wireless module
doesn't seem to like it, but a rmmod before suspending does seem to
work.  Oh, and I don't have the power switch working yet to suspend.

On a related topic, does anyone out there have a favorite CPU speed
daemon?  (Does it work with acpid?)


Thanks,

-kb