Randy.Dunlap wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 09:20:06 -0700 Auke Kok wrote:
Alan Stern wrote:
During a Power Management session at the Ottawa Linux Symposium, it was
generally agreed that network interface drivers ought to automatically
suspend their devices (if possible) whenever:
(1) The interface is ifconfig'ed down, or
(2) No link is available.
Presumably (1) should be easy enough to implement. (2) might or might not
be feasible, depending on how much WOL support is available. (It might
not be feasible at all for wireless networking.) Still, there can be no
question that it would be a Good Thing for laptops to power-down their
ethernet controllers when the network cable is unplugged.
Has any progress been made in this direction? If not, a natural approach
would be to start with a reference implementation in one driver which
could then be copied to other drivers.
Intel's newer e1000's (ich7 onboard e1000 and newer versions for instance)
already support this feature partially - the MAC stays on but the PHY can be
powered off when no link is present.
In order to enable this feature you will need to turn it on explicitly at load
time:
modprobe e1000 SmartPowerDownEnable=1
Please add that to Documentation/networking/e1000.txt.
I'm long overdue with documentation updates ATM, I'll see if I can fix that :)
Cheers,
Auke
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