power management not working? (laptop, puppy 1.05)

[BlackAdder]

pakt asked a question about wmpower. It is now working on my machine. Some settings can be changed, wmpower --help gives some insights, and there is more on the wmpower web site.
There are some other ACPI-related kernel parameters that I have not yet tried, such as acpi=noirq. On my notebook ACPI is shown as sharing IRQ 10 with other things. Might be worth a try.
Cannot test Intel Speedstep on this machine (Celeron 550MHz) - not supported on Celeron, but ACPI is supposed to be able to throttle back the processor when running Speedstep processors on battery.
There is another thread in which kethd was concerned about the hard disk running constantly. He identified the check_space process as the cause. Killing that process allows the disk to spin down. Using hdparm -s 5 does it for me, but it is worth remembering that check_space performs a useful function and turning it off should be a considered decision. The machine runs cooler and the battery lasts longer when the hard disk is not running, of course.

[Paolo]

Thanks BlackAdder,now all works very well.
This code:
''echo 10 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency ''
creating problem on my laptop (dell latitude c600),and without this line all
is OK.
Thanks for all,
Paolo

[BlackAdder]

Paolo,
You may find that the thermal zone on some laptops is not called "THRM", but "THM". You can check by using Rox to look at /proc/acpi/thermal zone. Why is this so? I guess that is the way the manufacturer set it up.

[pakt]

Thanks BlackAdder, I will give your tips a try.

[BlackAdder]

Just in case those watching this thread did not see Barry's note on 19 December, it is quoted below. The change can be expected in 1.0.7

I have modified /root/.xinitrc so that check_space will only be launched if free space in "/" is less than 20M. Thus, check_space will only run in very tight situations, such as running in a 128M-RAM PC with no swap partition. It will not run in a hard-drive-installed Puppy, as "/" is the entire hard drive partition which is bound to have more than 20M free (besides which, the full h.d. install doesn't use a ramdisk).

[J_Rey]

Using hdparm -S 5 /dev/hda worked fine with 1.0.7 beta for me, except that in earlier versions I never needed to specify it, it always spun down both of my hard drives normally (and separately too!). BTW, I haven't tried it yet, but does this setting get saved on reboot?

[BlackAdder]

With Puppy 1.0.7, check_space will not be running for most users, so there should not be a need to use hdparm. I don't think it likely that the spin-down setting of hdparm would carry across reboots.
BTW - there was no change in the behaviour of Puppy re ACPI after my notebook was upgraded to 1.0.7, but the disk does shut down after 2 minutes of inactivity. This value was set via the BIOS and now seems effective - might have been under 1.0.5 if check_space had not been running.

[Atchbo]

Hello,

I have the same hot processor + fan noise on my Averatec 6200 series (see other post) and have added the modprobe lines to rc.local (now I can see the temp). However, it still runs hot... how can we throttle back the CPU to get the heat down as in other linuxes (& windows)?

Cheers,
Atchbo

[BlackAdder]

Atchbo - What is "hot" in your case?
When ACPI is active it gets information from the BIOS about when to switch on the fan etc. and when to throttle back the processor. The settings are created by the motherboard maker. They are stored in a folder under /proc/acpi as "trip points". In my case, the trip point to run the fan is 70C, and the danger level is 90C. So the fan starts when ACPI detects a temperature of 70C or above, and it stops when the temperature falls below 55C.
In some cases, the processor speed is throttled back only when the machine is running on battery; in others "Intel Speedstep" can dynamically adjust the processor speed. There is a Linux Intel Speedstep support module to handle the latter case, but Speedstep support is not built into Puppy.
Does the manual for your machine say anything about CPU throttling?
There is an extensive ACPI HowTo if you want to read more at http://www.columbia.edu/~ariel/acpi/acpi_howto.txt
This site shows how you might throttle back the processor manually.

Hope this helps.