Reducing ATI display adapter power consumption

[David Zeuthen]

Hi,

On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 21:31 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> Referring to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=392022
> 
> powermode=`/usr/bin/aticonfig --lsp | grep -m1 low | cut -b 3-3`
> /usr/bin/aticonfig --set-powerstate=$powermode --effective=now
> 
> sets the power consumption to lowest on ATI cards.
> 
> powermode=`/usr/bin/aticonfig --lsp | grep -m1 default | cut -b 3-3`
> /usr/bin/aticonfig --set-powerstate=$powermode --effective=now
> 
> sets the performance to the default (boot) settings.
> 
> Does this belong in a HAL method, i.e. a SetPowersave(bool) on the
> device UDI, or does this trivial action belong in pm-utils?
> 
> I would err on the latter as it's a simple script that we can do
> unconditionally to save power. What do people think? It's likely we will
> want to do the same thing with nvidia cards soon.

I think this code should run only from the SetPowerSave() method on the
org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement interface and it should
be able to run as a hook using pm-utils. 

Also, I'm extremely wary of including such things calling out to
closed-source stuff in the upstream of a free software project. Probably
ATI themselves should just require pm-utils and install the hook
themselves (easiest) or punt it to the distro packaging either the ATI
drivers or the pm-utils package.

I really think that calling out to closed source stuff do not belong at
all in either HAL or pm-utils. I'm OK with providing the hooks for
people doing whatever they want though.

Does that make sense?

      David