AMD standby/resume issues

[bugboy]

I am using FreeBSD 8 with ZFS and I am very happy with it. Performance and featureset is the best I have seen around. With the exceptions of one thing... Power management doesn't work on my system. I have an Asus M4N78-VM board with an AMD 240e CPU and I can't get the system to suspend and resume. This is important for me, because I want to access my system at any time, but most of the time it doesn't do anything.

Now it uses 70W when idle and I would like to lower this. I had no success on the ACPI mailinglist, but I wondered if ACPI support is better with an i386 kernel. Can anyone comment on that and can I switch back to an i386 kernel on an already installed AMD64 environment. I only have 2GB, so AMD64 doesn't have a lot of advantage on my system.

 

[aragon]

Now it uses 70W when idle and I would like to lower this. I had no success on the ACPI mailinglist, but I wondered if ACPI support is better with an i386 kernel. Can anyone comment on that and can I switch back to an i386 kernel on an already installed AMD64 environment. I only have 2GB, so AMD64 doesn't have a lot of advantage on my system.

No idea about i386 vs. AMD64 when it comes to ACPI. You can't easily switch between the two architectures. It's more than just switching kernels - you have to switch the entire operating system binaries and libraries too. If you have space to dual boot, do that.

 

[bugboy]

Thank you for your reply. I currently have no SATA ports left and my disks have no free partitions. I'll try to get another drive and install FreeBSD 8.1 in i386 mode when it becomes available.