powerd effectiveness

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 23:53, Ivan Voras wrote:
> dev.cpu.0.freq_levels: 1403/-1 1315/-1 1227/-1 1139/-1 1052/-1 964/-1
> 876/-1 789/-1 701/-1 613/-1 526/-1 438/-1 350/-1 263/-1 175/-1 87/-1

I have a Pentium-M which shows -1 like that..
I think it's just that ACPI is not supplying power consumption data.

> I think the infrastructure used by powerd supports both cases, but won't
> get you much savings if the CPU doesn't support the first case.

powerd only uses the sysctl's - it doesn't need to know specific details as 
long as the cpufreq infrastructure understands your system.

> What I would like for FreeSBD to support is turning off of devices like
> WinXP does. Not only hard drives, but it seems that WinXP can somehow
> turn off network cards, USB controllers and/or devices and similar
> peripherals when running on batteries and those are not used (it seems
> it's not like disabling them completely but something else).

I believe FreeBSD turns PCI cards off if there is no driver attached.

I don't think XP actually turns those devices off if you are actually using 
them. Not sure about the specifics for stuff like USB (ie what happens if 
it's sleeping and you connect a USB peripheral)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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