Darren's WOL question(s) are somewhat timely for a heads up to the
EPA's MOU5 (Memoradum of Understandign v5) requirements for networking
and network drivers.
Network drivers are required to drop to lower power settings
(predominantly achieved by going to the lowest line rate before
entering D3), as well as having lower power consumption when idle.
There is also a stronger requirement for Wake on LAN.
The former can mostly be met by defining better power management
best practices for network drivers, but runtime power management
for networking will require that there be some interaction between
drivers and the rest of the network stack.
For Wake on LAN, the OS and it's components can only do one of two
things:
Configure it
Break it
Breaking it can also be solved by improved best practice, but
configuration also requires new and improved interaction to drivers.
So, I would like to propose one (or possibly two) new project(s)
within Networking (which will also be endorsed by Power Management):
Wake on LAN Configuration
This project would encompass API's between network drivers and upper
layer software (most likely GLD) for getting WOL capabilities and
setting operational characteristics. It would also include simple
CLI tools for administrators (possibly an enhancement to dladm) and
library API's (libdladm) that can be consumed by other graphical
tools.
Network Power Management
This project would encompass API's between network drivers and upper
layer software (this would likely need to extend beyond GLD) for
getting power management capabilites from the underlying hardware,
and then managing these capabilities when the machine is operating.
This should also include the ability to turn off unused components.
These two items could be a single project, but I believe that a WOL
configuration tool and the associated API's would be a much more
simple project than all-encompassing Network Power Management (though,
it could be a sub-project of Network Power Management).
Power management is an area of opportunity in networking, and should
be part of the core competency. Comments and suggestions for
improving the project(s) scope would be appreciated.
Cheers!
---- Randy
_______________________________________________
networking-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
