William Lovaton wrote: > Hello there, > > I've been tweaking my laptop to reduce wake ups and power consumption > and so far everything has been great. Later I'll post my experience to > share it with all of you but before I want to ask a question I have. > > I discovered that the dcdbas driver doesn't seem to be causing wake ups > but interestingly it was consuming actual power according to my trusty > Kill A Watt P3 device. > > With the driver removed the power consumption is about 14 watts > sometimes getting up to 15, but it stays in 14 most of the time. When I > insert the driver back it starts to fluctuate randomly between 14 and 19 > but it doesn't stay in 14 as much as before. I can reproduce this every > time by simply removing or adding the driver.
alternatively, you can just measure power consumption over time and get a more consistent view of the extra usage (e.g. measure 10 minutes with/without) if your kill a watt supports that. > So, as far as I could find dcdbas is a Dell driver for controlling the > SMBIOS or something like that, if someone can explain to me what it > does, please do. from the kernel sources: * The Dell Systems Management Base Driver provides a sysfs interface for * systems management software to perform System Management Interrupts (SMIs) * and Host Control Actions (power cycle or power off after OS shutdown) on * Dell systems. basically it frobs in firmware to make the firmware do things like shutdown/reboot etc. > Is this driver actually necessary? I can't tell. try running without it and see if you can shutdown/reboot/suspend normally. > how can I blacklist it to prevent it > from being loaded on every boot? Does anyone with a Dell laptop can > reproduce this? you can remove the module from the modules folder, or you can add a line to /etc/modprobe.conf: blacklist dcdbas I've never actually tried this myself though > But more importantly, where do I file a bug report so it gets fixed? check MAINTAINERS, in your kernel source tree: DELL SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT BASE DRIVER (dcdbas) P: Doug Warzecha M: [EMAIL PROTECTED] S: Maintained Cheers, Auke _______________________________________________ Power mailing list [email protected] http://www.bughost.org/mailman/listinfo/power
