I'm (again) in the process of optimizing my laptops power consumption. I noticed that "tdepowersafe" consumes ~ 2.5% of all CPU cycles - this is more than Xorg (1.6%) but less than htop (6.3%). So my question is: does tdepowersafe do constant polling? IMO it should take almost no CPU cycles (<1%)?

That is mostly through tdehw which in some cases can to freeze interfaces and so I have fixed the issue for myself in the patch tdehw-NoFreeze.patch, also as many other TDE issues like this one. :)

So, I have not more than 0.5% CPU loading on 800 МГЦ CPU by tdepowersafe!

Regards, Roman