video shutdown

[Zorac]

my onboard video appears to be using about 20watts, and i don't even have a monitor plugged in, anyway of shutting this down? i was playing with hw.acpi.video but didn't have any luck. no options in the bios to turn it off, only set the amount of memory, and where to look for first video when booting.

thanks.

 

[jgreco]

Just curious how you have determined that the onboard video uses that much power. It's certainly possible, but it also immediately raises the question that if you were able to quantify it, you should disable it the same way. ssh and serial are fine ways to provide a head for FreeNAS, and of course most management can be done via http{,s}.

 

[Zorac]

i have two similar setups, but the only main difference between the two is the onboard video on motherboard, and nothing on the other. when i did my testing, i used the same powersource, DOM, and OS, then swapped the motherboard, processor, and ram. processors were both p4, with a slightly different clock speed and different sockets, i was doing my testing at idle though, so clock speed shouldnt of been a big contributing factor. the actual differnce between the two setup is actually 25 watts, but a small amount can be attributed to other factors on the motherboard.

 

[jgreco]

Fair enough. Unfortunately, my guess is that you're not going to have any luck. I'm guessing that you're thinking of something like throwing the video hardware into ACPI S3 after maybe unloading the kernel driver for the video? Well, I think you'd definitely need to be able to ditch the video drivers and then get ACPI to do that for you, but the closest thing I see is acpi_video(4) and maybe hw.acpi.video.<device>.active

You'd be better off swapping with the non-video board.

 

[Zorac]

but a new board costs more than the power i would be saving... :P guess ill just live with it.

 

[jgreco]

but a new board costs more than the power i would be saving... :P guess ill just live with it.

Well, someday you might decide that you need another PC, or something like that, and then you've got an opportunity to revisit it. One of the nice things about an x86-based NAS is that you're not locked into some vendor's proprietary platform.