linux-kernel - Re: [patch 0/3] AHCI Link Power Management

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Date:	Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:56:00 +0200
From:	Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@...cle.com>
To:	Tejun Heo <htejun@...il.com>
Cc:	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...ux.intel.com>,
	Kristen Carlson Accardi <kristen.c.accardi@...el.com>,
	jeff@...zik.org, james.bottomley@...eleye.com,
	linux-ide@...r.kernel.org, linux-scsi@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Pavel Machek <pavel@....cz>
Subject: Re: [patch 0/3] AHCI Link Power Management

On Tue, Jun 12 2007, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >> I'm not sure about this.  We need better PM framework to support 
> >> powersaving in other controllers and some ahcis don't save much
> >> when only link power management is used,
> > 
> > do you have data to support this?
> 
> Yeah, it was some Lenovo notebook.  Pavel is more familiar with the
> hardware.  Pavel, what was the notebook which didn't save much power
> with standard SATA power save but needed port to be completely turned off?
> 
> > The data we have from this patch is that it saves typically a Watt of
> > power (depends on the machine of course, but the range is 0.5W to
> > 1.5W). If you want to also have an even more agressive thing where
> > you want to start disabling the entire controller... I don't see how
> > this is in conflict with saving power on the link level by "just"
> > enabling a hardware feature ....
> 
> Well, both implement about the same thing.  I prefer software
> implementation because it's more generic and ALPE/ASP seems too
> aggressive to me.  Here are reasons why sw implementation wasn't merged.
> 
> 1. It didn't have proper interface with userland.  This was mainly
> because of missing ATA sysfs nodes.  I'm not sure whether adding this to
> scsi node is a good idea.
> 
> 2. It was focused on SATA link PS and couldn't cover the Lenovo case.
> 
> I think we need something at the block layer.

I think the hardware method is preferable, actually. Doing this in the
block layer would mean keeping track of idle time, and that quickly
turns into a lot of timer management. Not exactly free, in terms of CPU
usage.

I've yet to do some power measurements with this ahci patch, I just
noticed that with min_power performance drops from ~55mb/sec to
~15mb/sec sequential on my drive. That's pretty drastic :-)

-- 
Jens Axboe

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