Configuring Power Management (Sun Blades Only)

by Jeff Hunter, Sr. Database Administrator

Hard drive and system power management are adjustable with the dtpower application
with Solaris 8 7/01 release and higher. However, the power management features were
not present in Solaris 8 10/00 and Solaris 8 1/01 releases. By default, power management
is enabled on all new Sun Blade systems. (I really wish Sun would change this!)

When the system is in low-power mode, the hard drive eventually spins down to conserve
power. Later, when you perform a task that accesses the hard drive, the hard drive spins
up again. You might have to wait a few seconds for the hard drive to spin up to full speed.
If you find that the delay is inconvenient, you can turn off Energy Star power
management using one of the two methods provided below:

Method #1

• You can disable the Energy Star power management feature by using the dtpower
application.

Login as the "root" account and at the system prompt type:

# /usr/openwin/bin/dtpower

The dtpower application is displayed.

Under the Current power saving scheme menu, select Disabled.

Press the OK button.

Method #2

The main configuration file for controller Power Management is /etc/power.conf.

• As the root user ID, edit the /etc/power.conf file as follows to disable all
Automatic Power Management:

#
# Copyright (c) 1996 - 2001 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
# All rights reserved.
#
#pragma ident "@(#)power.conf 1.14 99/10/18 SMI"
#
# Power Management Configuration File
#
 # Statefile Path
statefile /usr/.CPR

# Auto-Shutdown Idle(min) Start/Finish(hh:mm) Behavior

autoshutdown 30 9:00 9:00 noshutdown

device-dependency-property removable-media /dev/fb

autopm disable

system-threshold always-on

• Run the command:

# /usr/sbin/pmconfig

This utility is run from the command line after manual changes have been made to
the /etc/power.conf file. For editing changes made to the /etc/power.conf
file to take effect, users must run pmconfig.

pmconfig is also run at each system boot.