Power usage Q and parallel make question (separate issues)

[LA Walsh]

I remember reading some time back that on a pentium the difference between a
pentium in HLT vs. running was about 2-3 watts vs. 15-20 watts.  Does anyone
know the difference for today's CPU's?  P-III/P-IV or other archs?

How about the difference when calling the BIOS power-save feature?  With
the threat of rolling blackouts here in CA, I was wondering what the power
consumption might be of a 100,000 or 1,000,000 CPU's in HLT vs. doing complex
mathematical computation?

Separately -- Parallel Make's
----------    ===============
So, just about anyone I know uses make -j X [-l Y] bzImage modules, but I noticed that
make modules_install isn't parallel safe in 2.4 -- since it takes much longer than the
old, it would make sense to want to run it in parallel as well, but it has a 
delete-old, <multiple sub-dirs>, index-new for deps.  Those "3" steps can't be done
in parallel safely.  Was this intentional or would a 'fix' be desired?

Is it the intention of the Makefile maintainers to allow a parallel or distributed
make?  I know for me it makes a noticable difference even on a 1 CPU machine
(CPU overlap with disk I/O), and with multi CPU machines, it's even more noticable.

Is a make of the kernel and/or the modules designed to be parallel safe?  Is it 
something I should 'rely' on?  If it isn't, should it be?

-l

-- 
Linda A Walsh                    | Trust Technology, Core Linux, SGI
[e-mail]                      | Voice: [phone]