[OmniOS-discuss] [discuss] illumos power management

[Rafael Vanoni]

On Nov 14, 2013, at 17:49, "Paul B. Henson" <henson at acm.org> wrote:

>> From: randyf at sibernet.com [mailto:randyf at sibernet.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 10:44 PM
>> 
>> CPUPM can be independent of autopm, so if you desire CPUPM and not disk
>> PM, setting autopm to 'disable' is correct (note, autoS3 is only relevant
> 
> Well, my new draft is:
> 
> autopm                  disable
> S3-support              disable
> cpupm                   enable event-mode
> cpu_deep_idle           enable
> 
> Which I think is doing what I want. Unless there is some other component
> that would be willing to go into power savings mode other than the disks.
> 
>> Also, you *can* specify different PM capabilities for different disks.
>> Multi-terabyte drives are cheap, and could serve as the backup media.
>> There could well be value of having backup disks spindown, but keep the OS
>> disks always-on (you would have to enable autopm for this action, though).
> 
> For this box, the only disks are either the production OS or the production
> storage, but I could see that being useful for some type of online backup
> box that is only accessed non-interactively once a day or so.
> 
>> Lastly, powertop(1m) can be used to see how well CPUPM is working for
>> you.
> 
> Oooh, cool, I did not realize illumos included powertop. Looks like with the
> above config on an idle box the majority of CPU time is in C3 and the
> P-state is exclusively the lowest frequency. I'll have to run that again
> once I get some load going.
> 
> 
>> It may be more than you might think.  The backlight on flat panels is
>> the biggest draw, and may not be trivial.  A monitor rendering black will
> 
> Oh, it doesn't actually have a monitor attached. The box physically has a
> VGA port, but the only way I've ever looked at the actual "graphics console"
> is via the remote KVM app, which I only used when I was initially building
> it. Serial consoles are much nicer for servers :), the only annoying lack is
> that there is no way in the supermicro bios to select an alternate boot
> device via the serial console. You can get into setup, but they haven't
> mapped anything to pull up the boot menu :(.
> 
> Thanks much.
> 


Just out of curiosity, how big is this box (how many sockets/chips and how much memory)?

Rafael