I have my preferences set globally to not do work when the computer is in use. I have it set to begin after 3 minutes of being idle. I've started boinc with the -update_prefs http://setiathome.berkeley.edu flag and it sees there are updated preferences, but still uses 100% CPU while I'm using the machine. I've duplicated this behavior on at least 2 Macs.

I also have a PC, but it appears to respect the idle time request. All the machines tested are set as being part at home, so the preferences should match. One of the macs is a laptop, & it appears to ignore the battery power option which I've set as well.

I've tried all kinds of variances, including changing the preferences to allow running while in use, but it doesn't matter which I choose, the CPU is always at 100% from Boinc/Seti. Anyone have any suggestions on what to do, or is this just a bug?

I'm not sure, but I don't think any of the code to check for idle-ness or battery status has been written for the Mac client yet. In fact, I can guarantee the battery code hasn't been written for OS X...

I think the idle code is there if you're using a TTY, but the odds are pretty good Aqua use doesn't count as TTY use. Sorry :-\

Does OS X have a /proc interface? If it does, does it have battery status in there? It might be trivial to add battery checking support to it.. it was easy enough to add Linux ACPI support that I wrote the initial patch. :-)

Rob

As far as I know there isn't a /proc interface in OS X. Apple does have a power management system that is available to applications to read, but it isn't in the normal Linux location. I'm not even sure if it is available outside of the Cocoa framework.

> I'm not sure, but I don't think any of the code to check for idle-ness or
> battery status has been written for the Mac client yet. In fact, I can
> guarantee the battery code hasn't been written for OS X...
>
> I think the idle code is there if you're using a TTY, but the odds are pretty
> good Aqua use doesn't count as TTY use. Sorry :-
>
> Does OS X have a /proc interface? If it does, does it have battery status in
> there? It might be trivial to add battery checking support to it.. it was
> easy enough to add Linux ACPI support that I wrote the initial patch. :-)
>
> Rob
>
>

Overall, Mac OS X support is non-existent then. I don't intend to devote my machine full time to this.