Chris Cooke wrote: > Hi, > > I'm interested in saving power on Linux desktops and I'd like to > compare notes with like-minded people. > I'm a system administrator in a University department with roughly a > thousand Linux desktops. Starting in a few months' time the > department is going to be responsible for its own electricity bills > and this is concentrating our minds wonderfully on ways we might make > our computers run more efficiently. > > One way of doing this is obviously through the kernel improvements > championed on the Less Watts site, but we're hoping that we'll > basically get these improvements over the next few years more or less > for free as we upgrade to newer kernels with more power-saving > features - our freedom to upgrade to newer kernel versions between > annual OS upgrades is severely constrained. So, for the moment we're > looking mainly at making our desktops sleep when idle. > > Currently the Linux desktops run 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. > The machines need to be on at some point during the night to do > automated maintenance, such as adding and removing software packages > - but we'd like to have them sleep for at least the rest of the night > if they're not in use, and maybe during other idle periods as well. > > Has anybody else been looking at this? What experience have you > had? A lot of power-saving effort seems to go into laptops but > surprisingly little into desktops from what I've seen so far. Any > experience or tips would be really welcome! > > You're also welcome to take a look at what I've found out, such as it > is. > Here's a basic summary of what I've discovered so far - starting from > pretty much no knowledge of this area: > > * Suspend and Hibernate work pretty reliably on the distributions > we currently use (mostly FC6 and SL5). > > * You can control them at several levels (e.g. Gnome or KDE, > command line utilities, /proc or /sys). > > * A machine that's powered down can be made to respond to a Wake > On LAN signal but I couldn't get a suspended or hibernating machine > to do so. > > * Wake Alarms are a far more hopeful way of getting machines to > wake up during the night: simply tell the machine just before > suspending or hibernating it precisely when you want it to wake up > again. This seems to work pretty well. > > * Scripts in /etc/pm/hooks/ are run when a machine sleeps or > wakes up. > > * The automounter we use, "amd", crashes when FC6 resumes, but is > happy on the SL5 machines. > > * ACPI, pm-utils, acpid, DBus, HAL, gnome-power-manager, > TuxOnIce, swsusp, oh my... > > The full saga of blind alleys, puzzlement and slow progress can be > trawled through at https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/MPUPowerDiary and > https://duffus.inf.ed.ac.uk/blog/chris/tag/power-management/ - feel > free to take a look. > > -- Chris Cooke. > > Computing Officer, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.lesswatts.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
Arggh, thunderbird just eated my message. Here's the short version. Check out <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ifupdown/+bug/127010> and <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ifupdown/+bug/44170> for tips on wake-on-lan; it shouldn;t be hard to generalise them to your distros. My CS labs (York University) do automatic power down in the evening, used to do power-up in the mornings, and apply updates whenever the computers are running (I don't think they power them up for updates). They use Slackware, don't use hibernate or suspend, and aren't too bothered about start-up time. You might ask them. Alan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.lesswatts.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
