OpenBSD Gains Centrino Power Management

In a recent email, Theo de Raadt announced support in -current for power management on the Pentium M series of processors. This allows the CPU to be throttled and therefore power saved. Additionally, dhclient was modified so that it is not necessary to find the process of the already-running dhclient and kill it before running dhclient again. This is useful for laptops that spend time roaming between different wireless networks, when dhclient is used fairly often.

Comments

Before anyone comments, on linux it's cpufreq

[Ayanami Rei]

And yes, it supports Centrino.

In fact, the only OS that doesn't have a native

[Ayanami Rei]

interface now seems to be Windows NT 5.x. (okay, so XP SP1 supports automatic throttling, but you can't control it)
Yawn. 3rd party software? Bleah.

Re:If it's hibernating, it won't be any faster.

[addaon]

Yup, there are three differences between the powerbooks and (most, not all) pc laptops. First, the powerbooks are energy-star compliant, which is a goofy way of saying they draw 1W of power when suspended (on battery; they actually take about 3W when on AC, for reasons I don't quite get). This is what allows such long suspend times. Second, they don't support hibernate at all; if you're going away for vacation for a month or more, you have no choice really but to either plug in the powerbook, or shut it down; with a pc, you'd probably just hibernate it. Third, the lid switches work really damn well. There are a lot of PC's that have that, now, but it's still not consistent... the goal, just to let the pc makers know, is so that closing suspends immediately, and opening has an image on the screen before the screen is visible to the user.