Power Management

CPU Power Management for x86 Systems

CPU power management for single and multiprocessor systems is available in the Solaris 10 OS (from the 5/08 update) and in OpenSolaris.

This feature monitors CPU utilization and lowers the CPU frequency (hence reducing power consumption) when utilization is low.

Processor Support

Intel processors that belong to Family 0xF (Models >=0x3) or Family 0x6 (Models >=E), including:

Refer to your system documentation to ensure Power Management is enabled in the BIOS.

How to Enable CPU Power Management

Feature is not enabled by default. Sysadmin must enable by editing /etc/power.conf

This file is used by the Power Management configuration program pmconfig(1M) to initialize the settings for Power Management. If you make changes to this file, you must run pmconfig(1M) manually for the changes to take effect.

To turn on CPU power management:

cpupm enable

To set CPU idle threshold, in this case to 15 seconds:

cpu-threshold 15s

To inspect the current CPU clock frequency to ensure CPU frequency reduction has taken effect:

$ kstat -m cpu_info -s current_clock_Hz
Additional Resources
  • Powertop - a tool to investigate power usage on a running system

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