Comment 85 for bug 760131

No, I wasn't doing anything at all with the mouse when I recorded the information from Powertop. Also, the other USB device was just an empty flash card that I left plugged in. I closed out of everything before refreshing Powertop, including all file manager windows. Perhaps not surprisingly, leaving any browser open brings the wakeups far above 2000 per second, consistently.

Out of curiosity, I unplugged the flash drive and mouse, and the results are the same. i915 and Load balancing tick are, as usual, at the top of the list, but why PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad (or more often "USB device 1-4 : USB2.0-CRW (Generic)" at about the same value) should, consistently, especially when I'm not using them, seems weird. I don't know.

    PowerTOP version 1.13 (C) 2007 Intel Corporation

Cn Avg residency P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running) ( 1.8%) 2.17 Ghz 0.0%
polling 0.0ms ( 0.0%) 1.67 Ghz 0.0%
C1 mwait 10.0ms (49.0%) 1333 Mhz 0.0%
C3 mwait 0.5ms (49.3%) 1000 Mhz 100.0%

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 1141.2 interval: 3.0s
no ACPI power usage estimate available

Top causes for wakeups:
  19.7% ( 33.7) [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
  16.8% ( 28.7) [i915] <interrupt>
  16.2% ( 27.7) PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad interrupt
   8.4% ( 14.3) phy0

I'll try the stuff you mentioned.