[ltp] vbestate works, but...

[Alex Deucher]

On 4/15/05, Niel Lambrechts <antispam@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>=20
> First off, Mario, well done on discovering the vbestate solution, Ive bee=
n
> waiting on ATI since January 2004 and contacted them countless times!
>=20
> That said, could someone please confirm if this results in a higher power
> consumption after resuming from either S3/S4?
> My battery will only last 1-1.5 hrs if I resume using vbestate instead of
> 3-3.5 hrs, I dont see anything strange using top/ps so it must be BIOS
> controlled? Maybe some VESA power-saving mode setting gets lost when
> suspending?
>=20
> Also, maybe we can contact ATI to inform them that this type of utility
> makes a difference, perhaps it could open their eyes to the root cause?
>=20
> For those who care, I use the vbestate resume solution on a Thinkpad
> R50P/FireGL T2 128, SuSE 9.2, ACPI, and can resume from S3 (suspend to RA=
M)
> or S4 (suspend to disk) using Xorg.
>=20
> Regards,
> Niel
>=20

I haven't been following this discussion, but vbe is nothing but bios
calls (VESA BIOS Extensions) .  VBE provides some basic functionality
via a universal interface implemented via video bios calls.  It has no
notion of powersaving features, and probably doesn't take into account
the command processor or anything more than basic mode setting
(probably only saves/restores/sets crtc and output regs).  There may
be vendor specific video bios calls that the system bios makes to
setup some extended state on the video chip (like power states, etc.)
but those are probably not accessable via the standard vbe calls.
you'd either need to know the extened bios calls, or poke the correct
regs in a suspend/resume routine.

Alex