Power save tips?

grant123 · Veteran Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 1080

I'm trying to run a Gigabyte Brix 2807 from a battery for as long as possible. I think I've optimized the Power Management section of the kernel config and I've disabled SMP. Any other ideas?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856164017

blu3bird · Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2014 10:18 pm Post subject:

Use sys-power/powertop to monitor your power usage. It will also give you some configuration advices.

Best advice is probably: Turn off stuff you don't need. Spin down the hard drive and vga, suspend usb devices and audio..

If you have long "idle periods", you could try to suspend the whole system to ram, sleep for a few minutes and unsuspend it using wake on lan or something like that.
_________________
Black Holes are created when God divides by zero!

grant123 · Veteran Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 1080

I will definitely check out powertop. Wake on LAN could be really handy too. How do I go about automatically suspending devices I'm not using?

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

There's USB autosuspend, but it's off by default afaik. This may be useful there. It works on lots of things, even input devices - I have it on a drawing tablet that otherwise has an annoying "standby" LED flashing at me all day.

Not sure how useful PCI autosuspend is. I've tried mass-enabling it through powertop myself and didn't see much difference (and it caused some very annoying network reliability issues).

grant123 · Veteran Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 1080

Nice, USB autosuspend could be just what I need. It seems to work fine on my USB keyboard/trackpad but the LED on my USB sound card doesn't go out so I don't think it's working there. If I do a full system suspend then the LED does go out. Should the behavior be the same?

EDIT: Actually it does work as long as I close my mpd client (cantata). Killer stuff, thanks!