Hi Jensen, Totally agree that it is not good to use more power when not needed. We are developing various features to reduce that. On AMD processors 15 and below because of no invariant TSC support, Powernow is not currently supported. Since there are lot of other projects lined up and compared to the resources we have, any contribution from the opensolaris community to provide this support would be great.
Also, is it possible that some background activity is keeping other devices in the system busy. What does the powertop result show? Thanks Anup On 12/11/09 13:09, Jensen Lee wrote: > I just run a simple test comparison on a dual Opteron 275 system (dual core > with frequency scaling AMD PowerNow!) > > 1) OpenSolaris build 128 (xen and plain): idle 200-220 Watts, browsing the > Internet with firefox 200-220Watts > > 2) Fedora 12 (no xen): idle 75Watts, Browsing the Internet 110-120Watts, > compiling the kernel 170-220Watts > > Big difference!!! > > Is Sun going to do anything about this? Copenhagen ... ? > Because in my case I am really bordering to go back to Linux. > > I now have an home file/internet server running Linux xen and based on > Tualatin CPUs. This server takes a fixed 120W. My newer dual Opteron 275 is > faster and potentially can save on power consumption also thanks to > consolidation of other servers due to virtualization. > > Due to zfs and virtualization I considered to adopt OpenSolaris on the new > server that I will leave on 24/7, but given that when I am not at the console > the CPU usage is very low, running it a max CPU speed all the time is an > insult to the efforts everyone are making to save on carbon emissions (and > power costs). > > I read about several suggestions to configure /etc/power.conf, etc. Nothing > helps, because simply these CPUs power management is not supported. > -- Anup Pemmaiah Sun Microsystems
