Energy consumption of core

[bulek]

I'm also concerned about power consumption and looking for ways to decrease it.

Majority of smart home community is talking about power usage reductions cause of its "smart" features, but if we put power hungry PCs in them, then it is hard to talk about energy efficiency.

I have put even Mobile procesor in my asus p4p800 e-deluxe board some year or two ago, to minimize consumption, but it didn't help much (that adapter doesn't let voltage scaling of procesor that can now be done on newer processors).

I identify several bigger groups of power hungry details :
- processor by itself in idle mode - majority of "away" state, LMCE will be doing only video surveillance, maybe mythtv record and nothing else. In such state it would be wise to use as little as possible resources... I remember that some kind of voltage/frequency scaling daemons (cpufreqd?) were around to take advantage of newer processors features to cut down power usage to bare minimum for current resource needs. Anyone more familiar if those daemons still exist in some newer form and if they are active by default ?

- disks - we have large spinning disks in Cores. Currently also there is a problem of logs - they are mostly still outputting a lot of informations in them, so logging disk is in constant use. But in my core, I use separate disk with media that could be spinned down during non-media-needed intervals.

Anyone more familiar with spinning disks down etc... ?

- screen saver - we have quite CPU intensive screen saver, that doesn't do its job by definition (screen & power saver? ). Maybe it could be activated only during idle in one of "home" modes  and not when in "away" mode, cause at that time nobody is at home...

I have a energy consumption meter, but older HW, so cannot do usefull measurements, but would be more than happy if we can start new page on Wiki about this problem and post solutions, opinions and findings there ....

Thanks in advance for cooperation,

regards,

Bulek.

[Zaerc]

You can set disk drives to spin down automaticly with "hdparm" (see the man page for details).

I would like for LMCE to set the screen (VGA monitor in this specific case) to stand by after 10 or 15 minutes of showing the screen saver.  That works when KDE is using the screen, but something is preventing it when the orbitter is using the display.  Any thoughts?

[CrafyZA]

The idea I had was to use sleep mode. If we can find a way to program a button from the infrared remote to get the pc into s3 mode it will save a lot of energy. Then options like wake on lan will ensure that the core will come online again when needed...

[bulek]

The idea I had was to use sleep mode. If we can find a way to program a button from the infrared remote to get the pc into s3 mode it will save a lot of energy. Then options like wake on lan will ensure that the core will come online again when needed...

Well I thought and tried a lot for sleep mode. If you only need core for media and things when you're home that's ok, but not if you run telephony and video surveillance. Also AFAIK, systems going into and coming out of sleep state are not so reliable, so it can quite easily happen that it won't wake up anymore.... But sleep mode is more perfect for MDs.

So I guess all features of scaling CPU voltage and frequency should be exploited and spinning disk down, I guess idle consumption should be very low. But I just don't know how far can one go under current version of Kernel and KUbuntu.

Regards,

Bulek.

[Plum]

Hi,

I have the same concerns about the energy consumption of a core that is left on 24/7.

What I am trying to do is put together a Core/Hybrid that run on a Core Duo laptop Processor to minimise processor power consumption, I currently have a t2300 (1.6Ghz x2) with a TDP of 34w, but I am currently looking on ebay for a low voltage version which should bring the TDP down to 15w.

My plan is to then have 2.5" laptop processor running the operating system and LinuxMCE (and perhaps mp3) then additional 3.5" discs for the other media and spin them down when not in use.

The current system I have is:-

Motherboard - MSI Speedster A4R (Intel i945 chipset, Socket 479)
Processor - T2300 (1.6 GHz x2, 2Mb L2 cache, 34w TDP)
Memory - 2GB 667Mhz DDR2

Can not give you any total system consumption figures yet as I am new to Linux/LinuxMCE and I am having difficulties getting the system working. Initial install goes find and I get the system all up and running but when I try to add the remote, CCTV capture card or DVB card I always end up with 'Failed to regen orbiter'. Once I get that sorted I can give you details of the consumption.

[chrisbirkinshaw]

1. Spin down

The problem I have found with trying to spin down disks is there are a lot of processes reading and writing to the disks. It is not even possible to spin down my media-only disks for more than a minute as things like the updatemedia daemon spin them back up again.

2. Power consumption

My core is constantly running at 50% sys CPU use (in top) on an XP-M 2500+. I have done some searching and it appears this is a kernel bug, related to the SMP option being enabled for a non SMP processor. I cannot however recompile the kernel as I believe it is copied to the MDs, one of which is SMP. Correct me if I'm wrong however...

Chris

[bulek]

1. Spin down

The problem I have found with trying to spin down disks is there are a lot of processes reading and writing to the disks. It is not even possible to spin down my media-only disks for more than a minute as things like the updatemedia daemon spin them back up again.

2. Power consumption

My core is constantly running at 50% sys CPU use (in top) on an XP-M 2500+. I have done some searching and it appears this is a kernel bug, related to the SMP option being enabled for a non SMP processor. I cannot however recompile the kernel as I believe it is copied to the MDs, one of which is SMP. Correct me if I'm wrong however...

Chris

I have also got some more informations :

1. spin down - disks have only limited number of spin down/up cycles so I guess it should be needed carefully. There are special tools to determine which processes are accessing disk to prevent spinning up too fast. But as usual. I forgot where :-). But as far as I remember 2.6.21 kernel would be more suitable for such tasks.

HTH,

Bulek.

[aurum]

I thought I answered this already but I may have clicked the wrong button.

1) Core power usage (just measured) Asus M2NPV-VM AMD 4200 1 GB ram 80 GB HDD  65W idle and up to 95W playing HD video content.

I looked at Linuxbios and its interesting but no support for any of the hardware currently used for LMCE. And making a new BIOS looks pretty scary, don't want to toast a motherboard or processor.

r u use the cpufreqd-t?

[1audio]

I measured the power with a precision Wattmeter at the AC in. Includes everything in the box.

[cyprus_dude]

basic tip:

if you have an overclocking friendly motherboard it is also often possible to under-volt the processor,

a moderate undervolting (increase the undervolting every re-boot, until errors start popping up) will, even on a desktop processor give a 15-20 watt decrease in energy consumption.

your results will vary depending on your processor, motherboard and god's will.

laptop processors will take to this really well, as well as 'energy efficient' processors. just DO NOT try to install LMCE OR ANY OS on an over or under-clocked system. you'll regret it and waste hundreds of hours of time sorting out problems that were caused by components working outside spec (installing an OS is much more sensitive to errors then at any other point in a systems life)

personal experience has taught me that, *hmm*

[blackoper]

I've got some figures on a mythbackend system that I will probably port to linuxmce on the next mce release.
http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User:Blackoper
I have a p3 kill-a-watt if you want any other power figures on any of my other motherboards/hardware

I got my backend down to 41 watts total power usage with the system 2.5" drive before adding pci and pci-e cards and hard drives
I use hdparm to spindown my drives and have no problem doing so. I give it two hours before they spin down to keep the bearings from being worn needlessly. I leave two drives active that are what myth records to. For some reason they won't spin down even if you want them to.

this is the section I put together on how to spin down hard drives for myth. Not sure if it will work for linuxmce yet though as I haven't tried it
http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/RAID#Spinning_down_hard_drives

[chrisbirkinshaw]

You can't spin down disks in LMCE as it stands as every few minutes a load of scripts get fired off to snoop around the system, e.g. UpdateMedia etc.

If you set the hard drives to spin down (even using laptop_mode to cache writes) you will find they spin up again really quickly. This constant spin up/down is very damaging as a HD has a finite number of spin ups.

[bulek]

You can't spin down disks in LMCE as it stands as every few minutes a load of scripts get fired off to snoop around the system, e.g. UpdateMedia etc.

If you set the hard drives to spin down (even using laptop_mode to cache writes) you will find they spin up again really quickly. This constant spin up/down is very damaging as a HD has a finite number of spin ups.

Hi,

it would be probably nice if we can separate whole system storage into separate areas. One being system, constantly working and the other with media that can be spinned down at least when no users are present and through the night... It would be first step.

UpdateMedia Daemon could also have an option to run it every now and then, not all the time or maybe watch just certain directories ...

Regards,

Bulek.

[blackoper]

well since it doesn't do spindowns, then with all the drives I have, it is cheaper for me to use a separate box running linuxmce and continue to use the backend I have... I save well over a hundred watts of power with all my drives spun down. I can get a working linuxmce box up and using around 40 watts or so.

[forumworx]

Hey Guys,

This topic is still hot with me.

I finally setup a dedicated Torrent system that shares/streams my media around the home network.

I used an Intel D201GLY ($69) http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D201GLY/index.htm.

I bought a PW-200-M w/P4-ATX ($50) power supply and am using the system with just1 HD populated.

I haven't measured the power usage but it's probably in the 25-40 range during use.

I used to have a RAID system but it was way too much of a pig for me to keep it on, It cost a fortune...5 disks(with spinsdown), system running 24/7, I couldn't walk in my office without sweating. Not a viable solution for me.

I'm happy so far with the little system, but now I want to make a director from the same HW setup or similar. more info to follow...

Anyone else have a cheap Mobo and low power like the D201GLY as their director???

Thx