The Powersave Package - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 10 SP2 - DEPLOYMENT GUIDE 08-05-2008 Deployment Manual

28.5 The powersave Package

The powersave package cares about all the previously-mentioned power saving
functions. Due to the increasing demand for lower energy consumption in general, some
of its features are also important on workstations and servers, such as suspend, standby,
or CPU frequency scaling.
This package contains all power management features of your computer. It supports
hardware using ACPI, APM, IDE hard disks, and PowerNow! or SpeedStep technologies.
The functions from the packages apmd, acpid, ospmd, and cpufreqd (now
cpuspeed) have been consolidated in the powersave package. Daemons from these
packages, except acpid that acts as a multiplexer for ACPI events, should not be run
concurrently with the powersave daemon.
Even if your system does not contain all the hardware elements listed above, use the
powersave daemon for controlling the power saving function. Because ACPI and APM
are mutually exclusive, you can only use one of these systems on your computer. The
daemon automatically detects any changes in the hardware configuration.
28.5.1 Configuring the powersave Package
The configuration of powersave is distributed to several files. Every configuration option
listed there contains additional documentation about its functionality.
/etc/sysconfig/powersave/common
This file contains general settings for the powersave daemon. For example, the
amount of debug messages in /var/log/messages can be increased by increas-
ing the value of the variable DEBUG.
/etc/sysconfig/powersave/events
The powersave daemon needs this file for processing system events. An event can
be assigned external actions or actions performed by the daemon itself. For external
actions, the daemon tries to run an executable file (usually a Bash script) in /usr/
lib/powersave/scripts/. Predefined internal actions are:
• ignore
• throttle
Power Management 549