Slashdot Mirror
S3 Standby State Done Right
For Earth Day, Cameron Butterfield has written in with a pointer to his article on how to get your Windows PC into S3 sleep, and why you want to. It covers the question of how to take advantage of this extremely low-power mode even when your machine is an "always on" file server, remote desktop, or VNC server.
Great for Windows users... but what are the options to set up a Linux system to reduce power usage and fan noise when idle?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It doesn't seem to be a hot topic because I couldn't google a definitive page. There were lots of pages for individual computers or distros though.
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/power/ ... The exact file on my system is states.txt but it also seems to exist on other distros as suspend.txt
The documentation is probably on your own computer at:
I use the S3 standby on my MCE machine, and it's really really nice. I turn the machine on and off (well, awake/asleep) using the power button on the remote, and the machine is up and ready to go in about 3 or 4 seconds (as long as it takes me to switch the TV to the right input). I've only ever had it refuse to wake up once in the 1-1/2 years I've been using it, and that was remedied by using the power button on the front of the machine (it woke right up and didn't even need to be rebooted). Definitely worth looking into for instantaneous access + decent power savings.
This guy's the limit!
Surely enabling your PC to wake up whenever any network traffic is sensed is stupid in the example described in the article.
Will it not wake up whenever any workgroup broadcasts are sent to it?
Windows XP will often times not give s3 suspend as an option even when turned on in BIOS. But with Microsofts dumppo.exe utility you can force it to use an S3 or S4 state. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/products/Oemtest/v1.1/WOST est/Tools/Acpi/dumppo.exe To force it to S3, run this under command prompt "dumppo admin minsleep=s3"
often, my computers cant be put to sleep because theyre transferring files (over aim, bit torrent, you name it.. every app according to its need).
Ive noticed all companies, including apple, whose products i use, are giving you only a black and white choice. you either have the computer awake or its fully asleep.
i'd like to have a low power transfer mode, where the cpu is reduced (to 1 core at say 500 mhz), the monitor is turned off, and as much memory as possible is dedicated to the apps which are doing intensive file reads/writes. this will allow the hard drives to be used less by caching the files in ram and pulsing the hard disk.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
* Power bills are generally measured in kilowatt hours or "kW/h"s. Power rates might be as much as $0.12 per kW/h
* Our total cost of having the computer on 24/7 for the month in this scenario would be as follows:
*
That said, it is a good article on how to keep the "instant-on" without using excess power.
"If we take just a reasonable estimate that a computer uses 400 Watts idling along, we can find some astounding figures."
That doesn't sound very reasonable to me.
".4 kW (400watts) * 720 Hours * $0.12kW/h = $34.56"
Nope, that's way off what the average PC costs to run.
He does have a point thought about using lower power modes. On newer PCs it seems to work well and it will save you bucks if you have several PCs in your house.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Does that mean my PC costs one-quarter of what he calculates?
Guys! You found each other!
Shouldn't you guys exchange phone numbers or something?
S3 mode is entered by running "acpiconf -s 3"
/etc/sysctl.conf to be automatically set upon boot-up. Basically you'll only need "hw.acpi.reset_video=" set to 0 or 1 depending on your system.
/etc/rc.suspend. Put the opposite commands in /etc/rc.resume.
All available options can be listed by running "sysctl -a hw.acpi" and included in
If you need to unload modules or any other action before suspending, see
That should be everything you need. Either your hardware will work, or it won't. In the latter case, strip your system down to nothing but video, and try different video cards. Then add a piece at a time to see what's causing problems.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Welcome to the exciting new world of UGC.
Slightly off tangent, but hibernation (S4) fails in WinXP SP2 if you have more than 1GB of RAM.
My biggest problem with standby on my WinXP machine is that my machine will randomly wake up after a random amount of time. I've already disabled WOL and Wake-on-USB, but my computer will wake up randomly from standby anywhere from 3 minutes to never. I still can't figure out what's causing the problem. :(
I know I'm setting myself up for flames around here, but the OS with the best support for APCI S3 Suspend is FreeBSD 6.2, even though it's certainly not perfect.
;-)
...
.Xdefaults. The CPU can be trottled using any number of methods either on a dynamic basis, or at set time. Throw ataidle into the mix and you've got most everything you need for those "every few minutes' intervals. How many more options could you want?
/.
Perhaps, but the issue is a lot more complicated than that. We're talking about the BIOS, the OS, and then how the two relate to each other. That said, it doesn't suprise me that the article is lame. Setting a fixed IP address and making use of WOL? What's that got to do with Windows, and what does "done right" refer to?
The only informative (and amusing) bit was the Microsoft chosen USB behaviour (hidden) that requires an "easy" registry edit to change. So much for "Oh, no, not manually editing a config file!" I guess having all the behaviour and options explicitly set forth and easily editable is the wrong approach.
X.org... Since X doesn't play well with suspend, FreeBSD is supposed to switch off of X, to a virtual console before entering suspend mode. Unfortunately, I've found that, unfortunately, X 6.9.0 freezes about 1 in 3 times. Once I figured that out, it was just a matter of manually switching to a console
I'm going by memory here, but IIRC, that's handled with a sysctl. You shouldn't need to manually do anything. Read through acpi(4) and then Google for more info, or better yet, just search the 'mobile' archives for some possible settings and the merits of each.
Of course, the drawback to X not cooperating is that I can't set my machine to auto suspend when it's been idle for a few minutes, but I'm hopeful the next release of FreeBSD will fix that.
I'm not sure you want an S3 state every few minutes. It would make more sense to blank the screen (and kill the backlight on a notebook) by setting the DPMS option in xorg.conf, and set your screensaver options in
For a full suspend after x minutes, why not script your own approach? One option would be to use xscreensaver-command to invoke a count-down timer to invoke zzz(8)? Or if power usage is a Really Big Deal, make use of WOL and start/stop the system at set times. Dunno if that would work for a desktop system, but it might cut down the hours on
Slightly off tangent, but hibernation (S4) fails in WinXP SP2 if you have more than 1GB of RAM.
Works just fine for me. Probably because I installed the udpate mentioned in the resolution section of the article sometime last year.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
I work as an HVAC engineer, and I have to take into account the PCs when designing air conditioning for an office. I figure 200 to 250 watts per workstation; that is supposed to take into account average usage including everything: the PC, monitor, peripherals, task lighting, occassional printers, etc. I've been told that this is too high, but my career has spanned a lot of changes - dummy terminals, energy inefficient monitors, heavy duty PC workstations, efficient but larger monitors, LCD monitors, thin clients, etc. - so I tend to take the conservative approach and assume that it can change again to higher wattages within the lifetime of the AC system. Power consumption of devices keeps on being improved, but instead of using less power, PCs do more with the same amount of power. If your PC has a 500 watt power supply it would probably never use much more than 400 watts (you need some safety margin) and it would probably use, on average, less than half that while working hard. With modern PCs it could easily use less than 50 watts when idle.
Oh yeah.
Bill Gate's memo
That's an interesting email from 1999. Myself, I've been known to send emails to the tone of "how can we prevent the competition from leeching on our multi-million dollar R&D investment with our technology partners", but OK.
Would you like to point me to the follow up email from Eric Rudder that says "Hi Bill - As you requested, we've made the ACPI extensions specific to Windows so no one else can implement them. Cheers!" I can't seem to find it.
Oh, wait - here's ACPIfor Linux and ACPI for FreeBSD. Indeed, here's a quote from the WP entry:
Now, ACPI has its shortcomings. It's complicated. It might not be your ideal of a standard. But it is an open standard, which Linux indeed implements. It might be broken in some ways in Linux as it is in Windows, but implemented it is. It's an important standard because it takes hardware out of the equation, which is important for a general OS that's supposed to support a wide range of it.
I still use APM for the most part
Really? That's also a Microsoft-defined standard (along with Intel):
Is that standard "shit" as well? And if you all these standards from Microsoft are "shit", then why do you use them at all? You use Linux, right? Why don't you come up with your own standard and give it to the free software world so they can stop using all these "shit" open standards that Microsoft has bothered to make open for anyone to use? Which reminds me, I'd love to see that other email about ACPI I mentioned. Thanks.
powercfg -a
Works for both XP and Vista. Tells you what's available and what's not (S1, S2, S3,...) Vista tells you why something isn't support.
Got info from this page
Once you're done getting an education, I'd like for you to explain how "M$" allegedly sabotaged ACPI on Linux. You pointed to an eight-year old email from Bill Gates that, if anything, proves Microsoft did not do anything to impact the implementation of ACPI in Linux. Seriously, just in case your FSF distortion field is turned up too high, that's exactly what you are proving by linking to that email. You have ACPI in Linux. It might be as broken as it is on Windows, but you have it. You realize that, yes? God, please tell me you realize that?