ACPI (suspend & resume) and power save?

Investigation into how Linux on the PS3 might lead to homebrew development.

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alanine
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Mar 13, 2008 12:53 pm

ACPI (suspend & resume) and power save?

Post by alanine »

Hi, I just grabbed a PS3 80GB and installed Gentoo Linux on it. I wonder if ACPI works at all for PS3, that is, can I put PS3 to sleep and later wake it up? Then I don't have to worry about shutting down it every night and and restarting it every morning.

Also I notice that when I leave it idle for a while, the LCD screen goes blank but won't enter powersave mode. I wonder if anybody has a fix to it.

Thanks a lot!
jimparis
Posts: 1145
Joined: Fri Jun 10, 2005 4:21 am
Location: Boston

Post by jimparis »

No, ACPI is not provided by the hypervisor.
If you want to hibernate, things like swsusp should be able to sleep without any hardware assistance (it just does a normal hardware shutdown & bootup). I don't know if the ps3-specific drivers have proper PM hooks for that to work.

I see two things in the ps3-linux kernel: PS3AV_CID_AV_VIDEO_MUTE and PS3AV_CID_AV_VIDEO_DISABLE_SIG. The framebuffer blanking looks like it uses the former; maybe the latter would give you something closer to a DPMS standby.
alanine
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Mar 13, 2008 12:53 pm

Post by alanine »

Thanks for the pointers. I checked out swsusp, which is now called TuxOnIce, but it requires patching the kernel and enabling HIBERNATION option, which in turn requires HOTPLUG for SMP architectures, which again is not an option for ps3's Cell CPU.

So I guess all I have to do is to power off and on. PS3's peak power is about 200W, not something I'd like to sit through the night.
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