[plug] Standby and Power consumption

[Bernd Felsche]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2003 at 11:18:18AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> I'd love to see reliable power management in Linux, but it sure isn't 
> there yet. At the moment, boot times matter to anybody who cares about 
> their power bill or has environmental concerns about their power 
> consumption.

The problem is one of drivers.

VIA have some nice drivers for their EPIA mainboards that allow for
CPU stepping to reduce power consumption when "idle", and most IDE
hard drives have motor-stop facilities. A small system could get
down to 20W or less in "Monday-itis" mode depending on how slow the
CPU is running, what you can shut off and be reasonably sure that
it'll come back alive in reasonable time when you need it.

Suspend-to-disk is a bit of a problem if you have many differnt
devices plugged in. The restore process must re-instate the device
states completely, when asked to wake up. Often, those states are
difficult or impossible to determine.

-- 
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