[geeks] Solaris X86 power savings control

[Shannon Hendrix]

I just found something out that is pretty awesome, for me anyway.

Recently I upgraded my Dell T105 Solaris server to 8GB of RAM and 4  
CPU cores.

This caused a significant increase in power usage and heat.  I needed  
the power, but only small parts of each day.

I never could figure out how to make Solaris manage the CPU power.

Today I installed an application called "powertop" from Blastwave.

It's a neat program that shows you how often your CPUs are awakened,  
and which processes and events are the most common causes.  This helps  
you optimize away things you might not really need or can slow down.

It also turns on power management if you press 'P'.

My machine now spends of its time at 1GHz.  CPU and memory temperature  
is down, heat output is down, and power usage is down a lot.

Now... does anyone know how to enable the power control without having  
to use a program like this?  I tried the tools in my Solaris books,  
but they didn't do anything.

Anyway, very neat program: get powertop and play with it if you have  
Solaris.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com