powerd effectiveness

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <43C6584F.10001 at fer.hr>
            Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> writes:
: 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).

FreeBSD does put unattached devices into d3 state.  In 6.x you need to
enable this because this agressive power savings interacts poorly with
some devices that don't exactly follow the standards but are common.
The interface isn't as nice as I'd like, but if you load your drivers
you can unload them to power down those devices.

Warner