+1

rao

Randy Fishel wrote:
Darren's WOL question(s) are somewhat timely for a heads up to the EPA's MOU5 (Memoradum of Understandign v5) requirements for networking and network drivers.


Network drivers are required to drop to lower power settings (predominantly achieved by going to the lowest line rate before entering D3), as well as having lower power consumption when idle.

  There is also a stronger requirement for Wake on LAN.


The former can mostly be met by defining better power management best practices for network drivers, but runtime power management for networking will require that there be some interaction between drivers and the rest of the network stack.


For Wake on LAN, the OS and it's components can only do one of two things:
     Configure it
     Break it

Breaking it can also be solved by improved best practice, but configuration also requires new and improved interaction to drivers.


So, I would like to propose one (or possibly two) new project(s) within Networking (which will also be endorsed by Power Management):

   Wake on LAN Configuration

This project would encompass API's between network drivers and upper layer software (most likely GLD) for getting WOL capabilities and setting operational characteristics. It would also include simple CLI tools for administrators (possibly an enhancement to dladm) and library API's (libdladm) that can be consumed by other graphical tools.


  Network Power Management

This project would encompass API's between network drivers and upper layer software (this would likely need to extend beyond GLD) for getting power management capabilites from the underlying hardware, and then managing these capabilities when the machine is operating. This should also include the ability to turn off unused components.


These two items could be a single project, but I believe that a WOL configuration tool and the associated API's would be a much more simple project than all-encompassing Network Power Management (though, it could be a sub-project of Network Power Management).


Power management is an area of opportunity in networking, and should be part of the core competency. Comments and suggestions for improving the project(s) scope would be appreciated.


  Cheers!


        ---- Randy

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