Call For Testing: pm-utils-powersave-policy

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 10:59:58AM -0400, Chase Douglas wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I've been working on some fixes, additions, and cleanup to the current
> pm-utils-powersave-policy package that's slated for inclusion in
> Lucid. The package takes some of the good stuff from the old
> laptop-mode-tools package and moves it to policy scripts that are
> invoked by pm-powersave when on battery power. The items currently
> include:
> 
> * 10 second audio codec power down (vs no power down)
> * 1 minute console (tty1) screen powersave timeout
> * 60 (vs 15) second dirty page writeback timeout
> * Disable WOL for ethernet devices
> * Enable SATA link power save mode (when swapping is unlikely)
> * Enable multi-thread and multi-core power save mode
> 
> To test these changes, please add my powersave ppa
> (ppa:chasedouglas/powersave) and upgrade the pm-utils and
> pm-utils-powersave-policy packages. When you transition from AC to
> battery power these scripts will fire and log what they did (if
> anything) to /var/log/pm-powersave.log. You can also test by running
> 'sudo pm-powersave true' to enable power saving, or 'sudo pm-powersave
> false' to disable power saving.

Hi Chase, I installed your ppa and gave it a go.  Things behaved pretty
well, although I'm not 100% sure how to verify it's working as you
expect.  Log attached if you're interested.
 
> One easy way to gauge power savings is to install powertop and execute
> while on battery power:
> 
> $ sudo sh -c "sleep 30; powertop -d -t 30"
> 
> This will wait 30 seconds and then retrieve power information for 30
> seconds. During this time you should not use your laptop as we are
> trying to get a steady-state result. It wouldn't hurt to run this a
> few times to ensure the results are consistent. In the output you
> should find a "Power usage (ACPI estimate)" wattage that describes how
> much energy is used by the system.

I don't see a line like that, but I do see this:

    no ACPI power usage estimate available

HTH,
Bryce
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/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/95hdparm-apm true:
/dev/sda:
 setting Advanced Power Management level to 0x80 (128)
 APM_level	= 128
success.
/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/anacron true:stop: Unknown instance: 
success.
/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/powersave-policy-audio-powerdown true:
    Setting snd_hda_intel power down to 10 seconds
success.
/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/powersave-policy-console-dpms true:
    Setting /dev/tty1 console powerdown timeout to 1 minute(s)
Returned exit code 1.
/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/95hdparm-apm false:
/dev/sda:
 setting Advanced Power Management level to 0xfe (254)
 APM_level	= 254
success.
/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/anacron false:success.
/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/powersave-policy-audio-powerdown false:
    Disabling snd_hda_intel power down
success.
/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/powersave-policy-console-dpms false:
    Setting /dev/tty1 console powerdown timeout to 5 minute(s)
Returned exit code 1.