PowerManagement, do I have it right?

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Noblunts
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PowerManagement, do I have it right?

#1 Post by Noblunts » Sun May 18, 2008 4:22 pm

Ok, i've been tinkering and I've gotten power management up on kubuntu (i switched :]) I think I've got everything covered. My x21 consumes 9-14 watts of power on average when I'm using wireless and browsing the web. Is this good? Btw my battery is down to 50% capacity since I got it last week, yay.

Heres what I did.
Installed Kubuntu.
Installed Kthinkbat, Kpowersave, removed KdePowerManager
Installed the fancontrol scripts.
Istalled Powertop
{ mouse and acpi are the top reasons for wakeups, weird no? Moving the mouse seems to start the hd and the fan sometimes, this is also strange}

Set up laptop mode.
{ A little confused by people sending 5 to /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode, mine says 2 but it appears to work. Hd still spins up a little bit but I have to hunt down whats doing it }

Enabled ac97 power save and the dirty writeback centisecs.
I also did an hpet=force on bootup but I don't know if it took. I don't see the hpet timer but I do see some cpu_hpet thinger in powertop on occasion. I also remove uhci_hcd whenever I'm on battery and that seems to help a bit.

I know I still have to figure out how to get the firmware on my DWL650 P1 to auto-load on card insertion and set up wireless to powersave.
Did I miss anything? You guys are way smarter than the people on ubunutforums. They never help with anything.

aaa
ThinkPadder
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#2 Post by aaa » Sun May 18, 2008 5:49 pm

Don't think there's much you can do about mouse wakeups, it's just the way the mouse is. You can try using hotkeys to do things instead (one wakeup for a keypress vs ~100 for mouse).

Acpi wakeups are most likely coming from one of those power monitoring applets you listed (or maybe fancontrol?). They should have a polling interval, which you can set to once every 3-5 secs (sometimes it's set to once every half-second or something).

Use lm-profiler to track down stuff using the drive.

I don't think HPET will work on an X21. It wasn't officially supported in hardware until chipset ICH6 (T43/R52 & newer).

Not sure about the wireless thing, but you can probably start looking in /etc/pcmcia/wireless.

Noblunts
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#3 Post by Noblunts » Sun May 18, 2008 6:56 pm

/etc/pcmcia/wireless doesn't exist. All I have is hostap_cs.conf in there. I dont think I can just throw prism2_srec commands in there, can I? Thanks for all the help!

aaa
ThinkPadder
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#4 Post by aaa » Sun May 18, 2008 7:55 pm

Noblunts wrote:/etc/pcmcia/wireless doesn't exist. All I have is hostap_cs.conf in there. I dont think I can just throw prism2_srec commands in there, can I? Thanks for all the help!
Try creating an executable script called /etc/hotplug/net.agent with the commands you want in it.

Noblunts
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#5 Post by Noblunts » Mon May 19, 2008 6:54 pm

nope, did not work. :(

aaa
ThinkPadder
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#6 Post by aaa » Mon May 19, 2008 7:55 pm

So I've dug up a 16-bit card and tried this out. No, I don't understand how this system works apparently. They look like they're using udev to manage this sort of stuff nowadays. But copying the net.agent script to /lib/udev/ didn't work... so I did this, and it probably isn't how it's supposed to be done but it works:

Install ifplugd

Edit /etc/default/ifplugd and add your device (eth0, eth1 or whatever) to HOTPLUG_DEVICES

Edit /lib/udev/ifplugd.agent, and add whatever commands you want at the beginning (after the "#!/bin/sh" of course).

I told it to create some random file, and it did so when I plugged the card in. Oh, and I'm guessing you need to restart ifplugd to apply new settings.

Noblunts
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#7 Post by Noblunts » Thu May 22, 2008 10:07 pm

Cool! It works, THANKS! I've also noticed that the screen is still on displaying stuff in suspend. It goes off when I close the lid. Its not wasting any power?

aaa
ThinkPadder
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#8 Post by aaa » Fri May 23, 2008 5:05 am

In suspend? That's odd. Then again I don't have an X21 so I don't know if it's normal.

Make sure the LCD is totally off (it can still be on even with the light off).

Noblunts
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#9 Post by Noblunts » Tue May 27, 2008 8:35 pm

nope, not going off.
I tried adding a new script to suspend.d with the command
vbetool dpms off and it won't execute it.

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