The thing with power consumption is my mistake not Hubbards (who by the the way gave a great talk). One could read out of my post that I suggest that power consumption has something to do with the init-software. Hubbard mentioned process control programs because unlike in servers, devices are plugged in and pulled out in phones and tablets and laptops all the time and the software has to respond to this. Start that or that demon if it is needed, kill it if it sits around doing nothing, start it again if it hanged itself, etc.. This, Hubbard said, has something to do with power consumption, which is obvious. You don't want to have 10 demons which are not used sucking on your DC power all the time. Only if a program asks for a particular demon, start it.
To be honest, I am a fan of power efficiency. I really would also like my desktop run as power efficient as possible. Therefore I enjoyed Hubbards talk so much. I feel bad when I forgot to turn off the light and come back in the evening and realize that the lamp burned the whole day wasting energy. And I feel not really good about running an OS which is not efficient, especially when the computer is turned on the whole day. Therefore I really am a fan of process control demons.
You may not like OSX, but it runs efficient, I tested this with my Macbook (mid 2011). Using OSX, you can write up to 7 hours- 7.5 hours a text read pdfs, look up this or that in the internet (not watching videos). I for testing purposes installed FreeBSD CURRENT on a second partition on it (amazingly it worked without any problems, I used rEFInd, the only problem is that there is no Broadcom driver
) and tested battery life without having installed X11, just idle. It said 4 hours and 30 minutes of battery life. That is a big difference.
I am absolutely sure that FreeBSD has the means to solve that problem, may be using runit and other programs from the mighty ports tree but a fresh install is not that power efficient. I want to be at least as good as 7-7.5 hours when I run my Macbook doing work. This is a very interesting challenge, even for people who run FreeBSD as a server. I want efficiently running servers
because power=money and if I can get a more efficient software for running my server I choose that one
.