Linux 4.6 To Support Runtime Power Management Of AHCI Controllers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 4.6 To Support Runtime Power Management Of AHCI Controllers

For the majority of you reading this relying upon Serial ATA (SATA) drives, the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel will support runtime power management of the AHCI host controller for saving more power on your system when idling...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.6-AHCI-Runtime-PM

[FLHerne]

I wonder if all these power-saving options will ever be enabled by default.
By now you can almost halve power consumption on some laptops just by setting them through powertop, yet no major distro prompts to use them or (AFAIK) provides a UI for doing so.

A lot of new ex-Windows users will be thinking "Linux is rubbish, it halved my battery life", just because they don't know about all the options and how to set them.

I know some hardware gets it wrong, but white/blacklists seem to work alright for buggy SATA controllers and ACPI.

[Ericg]

I wonder if all these power-saving options will ever be enabled by default.
By now you can almost halve power consumption on some laptops just by setting them through powertop, yet no major distro prompts to use them or (AFAIK) provides a UI for doing so.

A lot of new ex-Windows users will be thinking "Linux is rubbish, it halved my battery life", just because they don't know about all the options and how to set them.

I know some hardware gets it wrong, but white/blacklists seem to work alright for buggy SATA controllers and ACPI.

Agreed... Matt Miller (Fedora project leader) had a post on reddit the other day asking what are some objectives that the community would like Fedora to shoot for in the next 18 months. I was half tempted to say: "make it an explicit goal for the kernel guys to reduce power consumption,"--aka, help sort out the bugs so upstream can enable all the power saving options they can. But, I knew that wasn't what he had in mind by 'objectives.'