[gentoo-user] kernel config power-saving arcana; and getting acpi working.

[Robert Persson]

Some while back I was trying to get power saving working fully on my desktop 
box and I found people talking about swsusp (as opposed to swsusp2) being 
part of the official kernel sources. This puzzled me greatly because I have 
never come across this option when configuring a kernel. In the end I 
resigned myself to it being just one of those things.

However yesterday, while I was trying in vain to get at least one acpi 
function working, I became vastly more perplexed to find that there is 
supposed to be a kernel config parameter called CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP. Again, I 
have never come across this option when I have configured a kernel. Yet it is 
supposed to be part of the vanilla kernel (e.g. 2.6.15). Am I delusional?

I have tried a whole load of other things to get things like acpi sleep 
working, such as patching the 2.6.15 kernel with the patches from 
acpi.sourceforge.net, making sure APM is disabled, as well as patching the 
kernel with a debugged version of my motherboard's DSDT, but nothing gets any 
kind of suspend or sleep working.

I understand that I should be able to trigger power saving states by writing 
to /sys/power/state, but whenever I 'echo -n standby > /sys/power/state' or 
'echo mem > /sys/power/state', even as root, nothing happens. I have checked 
the write permissions and they are fine. However 'cat /sys/power/state' 
invariably returns 'standby mem', no matter what I do.

acpid works, at least to the extent that the machine will halt when the power 
button is pressed.

If I could ditch acpi and get by with apm then I would, however I am not 
optimistic about this because apm is supposed not to like multiple processors 
and I have a hyperthreading P4.

How am I to get power saving (well, sleep at least) working?

Thanks
Robert
--  
Robert Persson

Conspiracy Bears:
Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears...

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