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.

And Linux?

Great for Windows users... but what are the options to set up a Linux system to reduce power usage and fan noise when idle?

Re:And Linux?

Gentoo's Power Management Guide [gentoo.org] is a bit gentoo-centric, but most things carry to another distribution easily.

Re:And Linux?

See this article: Debian HOW-TO : CPU power management [technowizah.com]. I used the info to configure a couple of Poweredge 860 server. Most of the time, it's at a CPU speed of 300Mhz instead of 3 Ghz. That saves quite some power, and you cannot notice the difference in speed.

Re:And Linux?

> what are the options to set up a Linux system to reduce power usage and fan noise when idle?

Disconnect those pesky cooling fans. They just make a lot noise and suck up power. Truth is, your PC will run fine without them. It's just a scam by equipment manufacturers to make a few extra bucks out of you. I've been running with them removed for years, no problems.

regards
Scott E. Brown
NOAA Antarctic Station

Re:And Linux?

A way to make a computer quieter is replacing the smaller fans with somewhat bigger ones, and slow down their rotation (eg. with a suitable series resistor). The aim is to get comparable airflow over the heatsink with lower fan blade speed, which means less turbulence over them, which means much less noise.

Nice FUD

Anything M$ touches is shit

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 [sourceforge.net] and ACPI for FreeBSD [freebsd.org]. Indeed, here's a quote from the WP entry:

The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification is an open industry standard first released in December 1996 developed by HP, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix and Toshiba that defines common interfaces for hardware recognition, motherboard and device configuration and power management.

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 [wikipedia.org] (along with Intel):

Advanced Power Management (APM) is an API developed by Intel and Microsoft

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.

Re:APM Sucks too.

Oh twitter, you're going to love this. Here's an article [advogato.org] by the guy that actually writes this stuff for your operating system. I'd like you to go through that article and please share with us where the guy that actually writes the stuff blames Bill Gates or "M$" for how ACPI works (or not). As opposed to just the general sense of "this stuff is hard" I get from it.

Once you're done getting an education, I'd like for you to explain how "M$" allegedly sabotaged ACPI on Linux. You pointed [slashdot.org] 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?

Also available on Linux

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.

The documentation is probably on your own computer at: /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

S3 and MCE

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.

Re:S3 and MCE

Under MCE, I use the MCE Standy Tool. MCE has a bad habit of waking up to record a show and then not returning to standby afterwards. This can result in the computer staying on all day instead of just 1/2 hour to record a small show. The Standby Tool has features to help MCE handle power management in better ways then Windows default methods. It makes me wonder why Microsoft couldn't get things to work as smoothly as this 3rd party software. http://www.xs4all.nl/~hveijk/mst/indexe.htm [xs4all.nl]

network broadcast traffic

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?

Re:network broadcast traffic

yes it will.
Or it does for me. Even if the computer is alone on the router. It seems my router occasionally broadcasts something and wakes up all my computers.

I've switched to using the magic packet alternative. The only problem is that since my server PC is behind my router, I have to SSH into the router and sent the magic packet from there. ICKY.

I hear other routers (mine is a Linksys WRT54GS) will let you WOL remotely. Normally, you just send your magic packet to the router and set up the router to convert it to a broadcast.

If I remember correctly, a magic packet is just a packet with the correct header and the client's MAC address broadcast to the network.

dumppo.exe the Microsoft Power Tool

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 [microsoft.com] To force it to S3, run this under command prompt "dumppo admin minsleep=s3"

Re:dumppo.exe the Microsoft Power Tool

I wrote about the power consumption of S1 versus S3 sleep [yafla.com], and as you mentioned dumppo.exe was the enabling-tool that let me take advantage of this great bit of functionality.

The biggest downside of S3 sleep is that about 1 out of every 200 recovers or thereabouts it completely fails to come back, thought that's probably a mainboard issue more than an OS or technology issue.

Oh, and a great little helper app if you use S3 is WakeUpOnStandBy [dennisbabkin.com]. It allows you to configure a machine to "come alive" at scheduled times, even from an S3 sleep (apparently the BIOS supports configured wake-up times, and this app knows to tell it to wake up accordingly just as going to sleep). Very helpful little app -- I have my PC set to come alive in the morning when I know I'll be remoting in.

Oh, and rather than waking up on all network traffic, as the article recommends, it's far better to wake up on WakeOnLan packets. There are lots of resources out there for that.

want a "file transfer" powerdown mode.

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.

Bad Assumption

* I calculated (24 hours per day) * 30 days a week [sic] = 720 hours
* 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:
* .4 kW (400watts) * 720 Hours * $0.12kW/h = $34.56

The 400 watts per hour is a really poor assumption. First, the average home PC wouldn't use 400 watts at peak, let alone continuously. Secondly, the 400 watts would almost never be continuous. Even a PC left on overnight will use far less power then one being actively used during the day. My power costs almost $0.11 per kilowatt-hour, and I have a power bill during non-summer months (damn AC) of about $45-$55 dollars with two desktop computers running 24/7. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if most of this came from my computers, but it certainly isn't as much as the article makes it sound.

That said, it is a good article on how to keep the "instant-on" without using excess power.

Calculations are a bit off

"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.

Re:Calculations are a bit off

Those 600+ W power supplies are purely for people with inferiority complexes about other aspects of their lives/bodies. Here's [silentpcreview.com] a discussion about how much you can run on a 300W PSU. 300W suffices for a modern high-end CPU plus high-end GPU plus a bunch of drives, when under heavy load. Even a high end system will idle at around 150W. A more sensible system is probably idling around 80W.

NOTE: All the figures above are *not* including losses in the PSU. A modern PSU should be about 7 5% efficient, so increase the above by 1/3 to make them comparable to the 400W number in the article.

My weeks only have 7 days in them.

From the article: I calculated (24 hours per day) * 30 days a week = 720 hours

Does that mean my PC costs one-quarter of what he calculates?

What an opening

Because of increasing awareness in the general public about energy conservation, the ability to utilize low power states on desktop PCs is incredibly underdocumented and widely unused.

The opening sentence fails to compile in my logic parser - there is little documentation because of increasing awareness? Better would have been: "Because of increasing awareness in the general public about energy conservation, people want to know more about the ability to utilize low power states on desktop PCs. What they're finding is that it's incredibly underdocumented and widely unused." Oh, and "underdocumented" doesn't appear to be a word.

Welcome to the exciting new world of UGC.

To see available Sleep modes from Windows Prompt

From command window:

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 [tech-recipes.com]

Re:FreeBSD

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.

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 .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?

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 /.

Re:FreeBSD

Guys! You found each other!

Shouldn't you guys exchange phone numbers or something?

Re:FreeBSD

S3 mode is entered by running "acpiconf -s 3"

All available options can be listed by running "sysctl -a hw.acpi" and included in /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.

If you need to unload modules or any other action before suspending, see /etc/rc.suspend. Put the opposite commands in /etc/rc.resume.

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.

Re: S3 Standby State Done Right

Slightly off tangent, but hibernation (S4) fails in WinXP SP2 if you have more than 1GB of RAM. [microsoft.com]

Works just fine for me. Probably because I installed the udpate mentioned in the resolution section of the article sometime last year.