[Mesa-dev] Ramifications of software development with respect to climate change

Eric Anholt eric at anholt.net
Wed Nov 2 15:58:52 UTC 2016


Nicolai Hähnle <nhaehnle at gmail.com> writes:

> On 02.11.2016 08:59, Edward O'Callaghan wrote:
>> This maybe somewhat of a striking topic however it is one that has not
>> really had enough attention, I feel, in a way that warrants the gravity
>> of if ramifications. Thus, I really would like to kick this discussion
>> into hopefully something serious and creditable that we can all think
>> about. Also, please excuse the generality of this initial attempt as
>> this will probably sound border line crazy talk..
>
> Yes. :-p
>
>
>> As developers we spend essentially the totality of a focus on - in
>> pretty much in following order of priority:
>>
>> i.) features,
>> ii.) performance,
>> iii.) bug fixes.
>>
>> However we spend no serious mental energy on how our software preforms
>> regarding the environmental impact. Now, while it is true we do think a
>> little about battery life and also performance, this isn't usually our
>> highest of priorities and is somewhat an indirect method of solving the
>> problem. I can't think of too many examples where we have actually gone
>> really out our way to think about this problem and come up with tools to
>> address it, apart from perhaps powertop.
>
> As nice as powertop may be, the real way to go here is to make it 
> unnecessary, by implementing good defaults.
>
> Also, what's the impact of the energy consumption of a CPU/GPU over its 
> lifetime vs. the impact of the production and waste disposal?
>
> I'd expect the (potential) impact of the driver software to be 
> comparatively small in the grand scheme of things. To the extent that it 
> matters, battery life and performance already provide good forcing 
> functions.
>
> The transmission mechanism through which software probably matters most 
> here is that the overall suckage of it (hello, JavaScript websites and 
> ads) encourages people to buy new hardware sooner than might otherwise 
> be necessary.

Wholehearted agreement here, particularly about how much weight the web
has in our consumption.

Want to play in a space that's working on massively improving the
efficiency of the web, and is spawning side projects that might get used
for improving the efficiency of not-the-web?  I've been working with the
Servo folks at Mozilla, and it's a really welcoming community.  They've
got a lot of graphics work to do, too :)
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