hibernation would save a lot of time

[delta_9]

a hibernation button labeled fast shut down or something would be a massive time saver.
i have been reading about hibernation and ubuntu and it does look like it has problems finding the hibernation file on boot but like all things it is fixable see below

http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2007/02/11/fixing-software-suspend-hibernate-with-uswsusp-in-ubuntu-feisty-and-edgy/

thanx

[tschak909]

dude, why are you turning your Core/MD off?

-Thom

[MarcoZan]

Hi Thom

a reason for switching off MD could be power saving. Say that nobody is at home from 8.00 AM to 6.00 PM, wouldn't be a real power waste to keep all your MD on ?

Regards

Marco

[tschak909]

not really, no.

-Thom

[teedge77]

it could be.

-TJ

[MarcoZan]

Hi Thom

just to clarify my idea:

keeping a MD on all the time is something that has to do with the importance you give to the services that are hooked to it and the price you agree to pay for it.

By an "energy balance" point of view LMCE is pretty power consuming. You are supposed to have a full blown server running 24x7 and a small energy fingerprint pc for each MD that you want in your environment.

This makes a discrete amount of bucks in energy cost at the end of the year.

In my country electric power is not that cheap and government is promoting a lot of incentives for "low energy home", and as far as I'm concerned I wouldn't mind if I can reduce all power consumption that in my opinion is not strictly required.

In another post there was a discussion about lowering CPU freq of Core/hybrid, in order to decrease power consumption in off-peak hours. I think that also the hybernation topic was already mentioned before. This means that energy saving is somehow an issues that more than one user start to consider, especially now that we have a reasonably stable environment and users are more keen to think about "fine tuning".

In my environment (that may probably differs from yours) the only reason that would suggest me to keep MD on is the "follow me feature". All the rest (lighting control, basically) is hooked to Core. I use MD only as media player and nothing more.

So in principle I need MD switched on only during the time frame when I'm at home.

Actually something that I would like (and as soon as I solve other bigger issue I surely try to get) is something that turns on MD at a given time, and that turns MD off when leaving home.

As I told in the beginning, this is my point of view.

Maybe this is a limited perspective, so if you have different idea share it with us.

Regards
Marco

[chrisbirkinshaw]

not really, no.

-Thom

Jesus, why would you say something like that?

My core runs at about 100w. My MDs are about the same, give or take a bit (say take off 10w for the HD).

In the UK it costs roughly £160 ($320 US) to keep a 100W device on all year. If I had all my MDs on all the time that would be £640 per year. Which is a pretty decent holiday. So no surprise I turn them off. And yes, I get really annoyed by the agonisingly slow boot times, so I am also interested in suspend. Perhaps to a local disk, or to RAM? (is suspend to NFS currently available?).

Oh, BTW, in case you hadn't realised, if everyone had devices sat around consuming this amount of power 24/7 most parts of the world would look very different in only a few years time.

In a world where there is even a market for devices which turn off mobile phone chargers when not in use to save a watt or so of power (yes, I was surprised anyone woudl bother with this!) how can you think that producing a green product is not important?

[gazlang]

In a world where there is even a market for devices which turn off mobile phone chargers when not in use to save a watt or so of power (yes, I was surprised anyone woudl bother with this!) how can you think that producing a green product is not important?

I agree! Its not all about the cost of keeping appliances on needlessly - I pay a fixed rate bill for my electric no matter how much I use - but I would not leave my core on 24/7 simply because I don't want to make a huge carbon footprint.

Hybernation mode would be an ideal balance of reducing long boot-times while still being green

[tkmedia]

I would also like to save power and $ while maintaining functionality. As a compromise I have been looking at powertop  http://www.linuxpowertop.org/ which should work when 7.10 is released this will help us determine what we can shutdown and hopefully get the best power savings for the way each of us use LinuxMce Would be nice if LinuxMce would use the info provided by powertop combined with the hw db and wake the various systems as needed and then return them back to idle when not in use.

Just my .02

Tim

[delta_9]

um sorry i did not come back sooner to check my post
 yeah i wanted to save power and i really do not see the point of running some thing when you do not use it. Like would you or I run my/our car all the time for the 2 or 3 times a day we use it ? nah same with my PC's. Hibernation feature would make it more like normal entertainment systems tv or dvd. i want to use it. i turn it on. 10 seconds later im using that device and it is not chugging down power needlessly while i don't want to use it. less money to pay and the environment will thank us all for powering down.

the planet is taking a good beating with this virus we named human beings we are like a scourge on the earth  with us thinking of more and more ways th choke out the one thing we all came from. im not religious at all but earth = god in every sense of the word.save mother earth one power down at a time lol   

[desmarch]

This hibernation feature seems essential to me. No reason to waste money and energy if we can do without.

[dragon_788]

Have you guys looked at the Fiire PCs advertised as MD? They consume <15w a piece (iirc) when powered on, I agree the load times can be long when booting, but honestly, your TV probably pulls as much power as one of them when its "OFF".

[pnauta]

Kudos for guys like gaslang, because I started this project to save energy, not spend it.  That's why I equipped my machine with a AMD 2350 processor, it should run at only 60W.  My TV uses only 90W (my old one consumed 130W) and 1W in standby mode.  Other things one could do: use solar panels to power the pc (http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/06/technical_foundations_diy_solar_powered_pc/) power down disks, use USB boot disk, underclocking, putting the pc in your living room so the heat is used by people, use onboard video, and numerous others.  That solar power pc project described shows that this LinuxMCE can be a carbon neutral machine (disregarding manufacture) to exploit.  One thing that will improve here: my daugther would leave my old XP 2400+ machine on to just charge her IPod Shuttle :-(

The only thing I'm concerned about: that machine will run DHCP for all machines in the house.  This means that it has to be on, at least when the DHCP lease expires.  I'm not sure that a DHCP broadcast would ever be able to wake a machine up.  Any ideas?  My router has DHCP, but obviously won't help, as we need to offer BOOTP to geet the MD's to boot.  But if I can fix that some other way (only use orbiters on these Windows based machines, use other players to just use shared media on the core) I will probably choose for that.

[chrisbirkinshaw]

I think there are two realistic targets we need to move towards:

1. Pressing the power button on an MD either puts it into suspend-to-RAM mode, or suspend-to-disk mode if it is possible with a diskless setup. The solution should allow the PC to be brought back to life by pressing the power button in less than 30 secs. I suspect that suspend-to-RAM is the best bet here.

2. Having a low power mode for the core, whereby it only runs its housekeeping and media scanning tasks every few hours to allow disks to spin down (check out laptop-mode in Ubuntu). Better still, it could only run these tasks when it detects (using the laptop-mode status tool) that the disks are already spun up. If the disk is not spun up then there is no need to check for changes as nothing can have been written recently. To avoid problems a full scan could be done every few hours. Another mode could be that media scanning is only done via a button somewhere in the GUI.


I think that it is not realistic to expect that the core could hibernate. There is no way to have it wake on a DHCP request. You would also not be able to receive phone calls!

Chris

[nite_man]

I'm also interested to suspend and wakeup my core/MD. Any chance to have that feature in the coming 0710?