Should 470629 be RC?
I'd like to make the case that bug 470629 ought to be fixed in Lenny.
The bug is that a process spends an unreasonable amount
of CPU time searching, waiting for someone to plug in a chip card.
Now, this may not seem important, but I did the math, and it turns out
to be a surprisingly large waste of energy and money.
On my system, a 2.8GHz P4, it uses 3% of my CPU, 24 hours a day.
For me, this is responsible for a (conservatively estimated)
1-watt increase in power consumption.
(On more modern CPUs, this ranges from 0.1W to perhaps 0.5W.
I'll take a conservative assumption that most people are running
modern efficient CPUs and that the impact on the average
user is 0.3 watts.)
Now, when you multiply that increase in power by the number of
Debian users (counting distributions that use Debian), it gets
big. With 10 million users worldwide, we are looking at a total
power consumption -- from this single program -- of several
megawatts. (Enough to power several thousand houses or a
good fraction of a percent of a nuclear power plant.)
At my electricity prices, this amounts to US$11000 per day,
and it could be several times larger if most people are
actually running P4 machines. Over the life-span of lenny,
this would amount to at least US$4 million in wasted electricity
and many tonnes of CO2 generated.
I have buy-in from the maintainer. He says that the bug has
already been fixed upstream and that he is willing to work on
it. (E-mail attached below.) I think this is an unusual bug
in that it has a real and large economic and ecological impact,
even if it doesn't really bother anyone much. Can we make it RC?
-----------------
NOTE:
Power estimates are from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_microprocessors
and similar pages. Estimates of Debian computer come from
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-540480.html .
------------------------
> Hi Greg,
>
> you're probably right regarding the huge amount of wasted energy.
...
>
> Greg Kochanski wrote:
>> > Actually, I think the economic and ecological implications of this bug
>> > raise it from the "minor" category.
>
> You're welcome to argue about its severity with
> debian-release@lists.debian.org but to be honest, I doubt your arguments
> will convince them. Nevertheless, if you manage to make this an RC bug I
> will do my very best to get a fix into Lenny.
>
> Unfortunately the upstream code in in libchipcard 4.1.3 is broken, i.e.
> not hotpluggable. A fix for this issue has been published in libchipcard
> 4.2.0, so a fix for this bug will probably be uploaded to experimental soon.
>
> Regards
> Micha
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