Projects Powersave

Introduction

In general, the Powersave Daemon is intended to make ones life with a laptop easier and more relaxing. Watch your lovely laptop smoothly shut down when battery charge becomes critical and see it wake up from sleep restoring your whole session you worked on last time... but who wants to suspend if battery runs endlessly? ;-)

Over the years, the powersave daemon developed to much more then just a daemon only caring about powersaving issues. You can consider it as some kind of laptop daemon doing much more and is easy to extend.

Work on the Powersave Daemon initially was started at SuSE by Thomas Renninger in 2003. But some more people got involved over time.

Involved people

• Holger Macht
• Stefan Seyfried
• Thomas Renninger
• Danny Kukawka

Features

ACPI and apm support 

Full support of both acpi and apm in the same way

Five predefined powersave schemes

Each scheme provides different settings which are fully configurable. Adding of customized schemes is also ossible. The current scheme is automatically switched depending on the current power source or other events:

   * Powersave
   * Performance
   * Acoustic
   * Presentation
   * Advanced Powersave

CPU frequency scaling

Full support for CPU frequency scaling, either through kernel (ondemand governor) or within userspace. Also multi core systems are supported. There are three predefined cpu policies from which one can choose:

   * Dynamic
   * Powersave
   * Performance 

Battery management

Battery management includes notifying the admin/user when a critical battery state is reached and automatically shuts down the system on specific events (fully configurable).

Suspending your laptop

Support for suspend to disk, suspend to ram and standby. This includes caring about setting up modules, network services and a lot more.

Throttling 

Automatic CPU throttling depending on the current cooling policy

Display brightness 

Automatic display brightness adjustment for supported laptops

Powersave event interface

Fully configurable powersave events one can simply react on with bash scripts which are easy to extend

Clients to control and extend the functionality

Full featured dbus implementation for communication with various clients like kpowersave, wmpowersave, or gkrellm-powersave. More to come...

Being a real community project

Having kept the development mainly internal for some time now, this year powersave opened up its doors and developed towards a real community project. It is hosted within a public cvs server, releases are regulary made on sourceforge and novellforge and a public mailinglist is available. Furthermore, the distribution dependence got heavily eliminated and so it should run on all major Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, and Gentoo to mention only a few. Unfortunatelly, the Powersave Daemon still has the reputation to be a "SUSE-only" project. But this is definitely not true and we are working hard to change reputation. We encourage everybody to take part in development and we do our best to satisfy all users which like to use and extend it.

Packages and svn access

• Get the newest tarballs from novellforge or sourceforge. SUSE, Fedora Core 4 and Mandriva 2006.1 rpms are provided. But we will joyfully acceps any package from other distributions to publish there.

• You can browse the svn repository or checkout the source directly.

Getting help

Online Documentation

• The main documentation can be found at the sourceforge project page. This documentaion includes some technical aspects how to extend the Powersave Daemon, the source code documentation, workarounds to get suspend finally working, debugging acpi issues, the internal design and a lot more.

• For problems regarding suspend, you may also look at Bugs:Suspend_Failure. Additionally, an FAQ will be created soon.

• powersave-users and powersave-devel mailinglist archives

powersave-users mailing list

Before writing a mail, look if you can find something in the web and read the obove mentioned documentation. Many problems have already been addressed and a solution is provided. But nevertheless, user support and helping with common problems and configuration is done on the powersave-devel@forge.novell.com mailing list. Click here to subcribe.

Getting involved

The mailing list at powersave-devel@forge.novell.com is a good starting point for everything regarding development. If you have any ideas, feature requests, criticism or want to help us in any other way, write a mail. We will care about every concern. If you are not sure if you are at the right place for something, anyway, please give it a try. We need your feedback and involvement to make the Powersave Daemon just better! Patches are surely welcome, too ;-) --> subscription

Reporting Bugs

Certainly, the novell bugzilla would be the best place for bugreports. But the powersave-devel mailinglist is also ok if you do not like to create a bugzilla account.

Powersave clients

• KPowersave: Maybe "the one and only" fully featured powersave client maintained by Danny Kukawka. It shows you the current battery charge level, ac adapter status, cpu load and a lot more. It lets you control additional features like autosuspend, screensaver settings and again, a lot more ;-) See the [[Projects_KPowersave|KPowersave project page] that is created soon for more information.

• The command line interface (part of the daemon package) 'powersave'

• wmpowersave for WindowMaker maintained by myself, Holger Macht

• gkrellm-powersave maintained by Stefan Seyfried

General research

Additonally to "pure" implementing of features, we are doing some nice research regarding power management in general. The main research currently is power consumption of devices