Holger's Blog

1. New release 0.13.0
2. CPU Hotplugging
3. Suspend to ram that 'just works'
4. Make use of our messaging architecture
5. Excerpt from the changelog

I'm glad to announce a brand new release of the Powersave Daemon. It's tagged with 0.13.0, our so called 'unstable' series of releases. 0.12.x is, or will become, the stable set which will be maintained over a long time period. SUSE 10.0 packages are already available on sourceforge, FC4 or Mandriva packages will follow soon.

So, what's new? The most important thing is definitely the support for CPU hotplugging with full integration into our scheme architecture.

[Once again, I think we are the first application out there implementing that state of the art feature and integrating it into an easy to use architecture]

What about disabling one of two cores when running on batteries and being at full throttle when on ac? I think this simply a great and promising opportunity. Unfortunatelly, up to now only newer laptops support it at all, but this will become more and more important in future. Of course, this also works for desktop or server systems. So if you are already in a position (like me ;-) to make use of it, try it and provide feedback of any kind. Integration into kpowersave will be done soon.

There's a new configuration variable that can be set in each scheme controlling CPU hotplugging: From /etc/powersave/scheme_powersave:

` ## Path: System/Powermanagement/Powersave/CPU ## Type: integer(1:100) ## Default: "0" # # Set how much CPUs should be online at max. A value of 0 means 'all'. # MAX<sub>CPUSONLINE</sub>="" `

We integrated the s2ram utility from the suspend project ¹ into the daemon if it is installed. Thanks to Stefan Seyfried for doing the most work! This tool integrates all those nasty workarounds like vbetool, radeontool or setting acpi video flags like s3_mode or s3 bios. Additonally, or even more important, it contains a huge whitelist of machines that are known to work with suspend to ram including the hacks which are needed for each of those systems. But this list is of course not complete. So…

PLEASE HELP US! Stefan created a wikipage on openSUSE ² that explains the steps that can be done to get suspend to ram working out of the box without applying any manual steps. Please read this guide and if it makes suspend to ram working on your system, please provide the needed information either to the e-mail mentioned in the output of the s2ram utility or mail it to the powersave-devel list.

Furthermore, we opened up our notification architecture to be used by other root applications. Simply use the powersave-notify script located in /usr/lib/powersave/powersave-notify to make use of it. You do not need to bother any longer about in which way the user or admin will be notified, just be sure he will get informed.

What we provide:

No client connected and no X Server running: Do 'wall' message

No client connected and user logged in to X: Pop up kdialog (KDE) or zenity (GNOME)

client connected (like kpowersave): Forward message to client which in turn displays the message

` ------------------------------------------------------------------- Fri Mar 17 20:52:15 CET 2006 - hmacht@suse.de - CPU hotplugging support and integration into schemes -—————————————————————— Fri Mar 17 16:54:01 CET 2006 - hmacht@suse.de - if suspend is done as root user, don't use su to do the xlock (novell bug 158773) - open one DBus connection in library and reuse it (novell bug 157905) - add script for use by other applications to use the powersaved's notification architecture (e.g. upsd) - increase timeout we wait for hal to 10 minutes on startup - -r2079 -—————————————————————— Mon Mar 13 18:36:34 CET 2006 - hmacht@suse.de - fix compilation errors when C library is included in cpp application - add powersave-notify script to be used by other applications using the powersave message architecture - inform user on suspend2ram if his machine is not in the whitelist -—————————————————————— Mon Mar 6 19:06:55 CET 2006 - hmacht@suse.de - integrate s2ram utility from http://sourceforge.net/projects/suspend that brings along a huge whitelist and the needed workarounds (vbetool, radeontool, acpi<sub>sleep</sub>=) (seife) (closes novell bug 145294) - bump version to go along with upstream version - r1990 ` Have a lot of fun, Holger ¹ http://sourceforge.net/projects/suspend ² http://en.opensuse.org/S2ram