Apparently it's Earth Day
* http://www.earthsite.org/
(This one always catches me for surprise, so here's a rant!)
When I think of Environmental Themes and Linux/BSD, I usually
consider two or three things:
* Power usage (as mentioned previously on-list, this is important for
those of us who are on a budget)
* Low power-mode (Yeah right)
* Suspend/resume support for desktop workstations
* WOL support? Can this be done for a Linux/BSD server? (esp. low-
usage home machines)
I'd be interested to know how much success the local community has
had with these topics.
I generally feel pretty guilty and also rebellious at the same time
for NOT meeting Kyoto targets. (Take that Planet Earth, we're an
inefficient power-hungry race! Vive-la-America En-excès! Punish the
human race and natural world with thick coal fumes and nuclear
tailings for not being smarter in the wet-ware! You see, I'm just
doing this to spite Dalton McGuinty and the Ontario Power Generation
conservation TV ads telling us to turn off light-bulbs (I'm already
stumbling around in the dark at night, aren't you? j/k. Please don't
meter us, *eep*! Better fire up the old-Diesel generator.)
Queen: Please shut them off, I'm not sure the people can sustain more
smog!
King: But we must keep them alive, the future of humanity rests in
our ability to out-power the foreign army and innovate using decade
old hardware!
Queen: Very well then, but the power bill is going to be through the
roof.
A number of my machines I must admit, are Evil (more so during the
Summer), they simply exist to suck back power, sitting idle, absent
my having time to work on proper session management.
I've been tempted to simply pull the plugs/switch off the breaker!
But then I loose my GNU screen session.
I never got around to installing anything terribly useful to get the
full usage out of those Cycles and watt-hours on those machines and I
already found the extra-terrestrials on my own (with-out-SETI thank
you very much (though I want evidence!)) None of my machines use WOL
or STR. I don't even own a laptop anymore and have an 850 Watt ATX
case with 7 PATA drives and 3 SATA drives (though the cooling is
great). I have a rack full of Sun3 machines (which are off most of
the time, but the threat is looming! ;)
I'm also weary of any hard-disk suspend, and/or machine suspend/
resume as it's caused head-aches in the past, but it doesn't have to
be so! There is still hope for planet Earth! It really isn't *cool*
to maintain a farm of idle servers, don't do what afields doesn't
do. _Future Quest_ Low Power Computing is just around the bend, I
own a 1U C3, but we can do better!
Linux power management is arguably more mature than *BSD and there
are a number of Links which I found readily (but hadn't referenced
previously):
* http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6699
Whoe's going to pay for power management, is that a marketable
SysAdmin skill? No? Just think of the poor folks who have to put up
with grid failures on a weekly basis, how about them? And I'm tired
of a power bill that reads (I have proof): $321.54 (counting down are
we?) I think it's a message from Zeus the Power God!
Well so what can we do?
Opera is a good example of software which got sessioning "right". If
all our applications both Console and GUI were like Opera we'd be
set. Shut that beast Desktop off! Laptop suspend support is an
after thought, just shut down the OS and restore the session when you
power back up. But no, we have to write software that makes it
impossible to resume execution where you left off. This is a long
time complaint of mine. Even the Mac fails in usability!
And what about full-process check-pointing? On Linux there are a
number of process checkpointing attempts (top google hits):
* http://www.research.rutgers.edu/~edpin/epckpt/
* http://www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/research/migrate/crak.html
* http://ftg.lbl.gov/CheckpointRestart/CheckpointRestart.shtml
* Back in FreeBSD 2.2.5 there was an attempt at full-process
checkpointing (called Vista-Rio).
The difficulty has traditionally been that process pipelines/sockets
are hard to restore properly even if the process context can
effectively be checkpointed to disk and resumed after a reboot. Even
if you can get that part right, restoring the state of the
application (specifically with multi-threaded component based
desktops) is difficult.
D-BUS I believe is a great step forward toward being able to
synchronize full-user sessioning and checkpoints especially for
desktop applications. But it's my secret desire to session console
applications too
Unfortunately I have to say that Microsoft has the upper-hand as far
as usuability and accessibility in the "Hibernate" approach, but I
also am a bit behind, perhaps I've not tried recent Hardware Suspend/
Resume support in Linux - as in OLS:
* http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2006/view_abstract.php?content_key=147
as my opinion of ACPI was pretty much shot down with my MSI
experience. (read waste of time!)
Thanks,
- afields