pc power

Power management for PC-BSD

Basic info

Power management solution for Pc-BSd consist of 3 main parts:

• pwrd daemon (daemon that controls all power related things)
• pwrcli (command line interface to daemon)
• pc-power (UI for pwrd. Should be able to show current status, change daemon settings, etc)

All power control is profile based. User is able to set profiles for those states:

1. Device is on external power

2. Device is on battery power

3. Device is on battery power and battery has low power.

Main planned features:

• Display battery info (hardware info like supplyer, capacity, etc and current state including predicted lifetime and system power consumption). Multiple batteries should be supported.
• Control LCD backlight level (including optionally using intel_backlight port) Multiple backlights should be supported.
• Set actions on system ACPI buttons. User will be able to set some action ("power off", "sleep" or "hibernate") for power button, sleep button or notebook lid close
• Dynamic CPU frequency and sleep states changing (based on powerd code). Currently powerd has no external interface to change parameters dynamically, so (it is terrible!) I need to implement powerd functionality :(
• Collect and display power statistics (display battery rate and power consumption in time)
• Ability to power off some USB devices (like webcam, internal bluetooth adaptor and so on)
• Ability to power off WiFi adaptor

Milestones and current state

Alpha0

First alpha release and first merge to main pc-bsd repo. Features:

• Displaying battery status
• LCD backlight level control
• Desktop notifications

Detailed:

pwrd:

• Changing LCD backlight (done at 90%, need some last testing)
• Collecting hardware related info (done at 90%, need some last testing)
• Collecting status info (battery status, LCD backlight current level) (done at 90, need some last testing)
• Notification subsystem (not started)
• Profile manipulation (not started)

pwrcli:

• displaying hardware related info, displaying current status (done)
• changing LCD backlight level include relative (done)

pc-power:

• displaying current battery and power status (not started)
• displaying battery hardware info (not started)
• manipulating LCD brightness (not started)
• displaying notifications (not started)

Alpha1

Planned features:

• powerd replacement
• collect cpu related information (cpu load, frequance, temperature and so on)

Alpha3

Planned features:

• power statistic graphs

Final

Planned features:

• disabling / enabling devices (USB devices and WiFi adapters)