ACPI Wakeup
| System Wakeup |
Contents
Introduction
The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification is an open industry standard first released in December 1996 developed by HP, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix, and Toshiba that defines common interfaces for hardware recognition, motherboard and device configuration and power management.
The ACPI Alarm function can be used on your mythTV system to wake-up your machine at a certain time and/or date.
- Linux ACPI interface
Kernel 2.6.22+ use /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
Older kernels use /proc/acpi/alarm
- No ACPI Bios
Nvram is a small program that reads and writes the WakeUp time in the BIOS. This is done via /dev/nvram or via direct ISA access. (not recommended)
BIOS Setup
You will need to have a motherboard that supports both ACPI and a Real Time Clock Alarm Functions in the BIOS. Dont forget to enable this in the BIOS. You will find a tab similar to "Advanced Power management".
The wake-up function is provided on most modern boards by the ability to "wake from RTC alarm" - setting a date and time in BIOS will cause the computer to power itself on and boot at the set time. This setting is likely found under a sub-menu of "Power Management" "APM", or "Advanced" - you just need to poke around to find it. It will likely be called something like Wake from RTC, Wake From Alarm, RTC Resume, etc.
Tip: On many boards, when this setting is enabled, it will wake only from a time set and saved from BIOS setup, and not from a time set outside of the BIOS setup environment - as we want. All of the boards the original author of this document needed this setting disabled to correctly wake with ACPI. This is the recommended starting point.
Using /proc/acpi/alarm
Check if the wakeup function works: The commands set the wakeup time to 5 minute from now, regardless of whether the RTC is in UTC or locatltime and than turns off the machine.
# echo "+00-00-00 00:05:00" > /proc/acpi/alarm # shutdown -t now
If you're machine does not start 5 minutes later, check the following:
Here are the commands to check that you have ACPI working.
$powersave -S ACPI
Check that you have the alarm function in /proc/acpi/alarm. This prints out the RTC Alarm clock from the BIOS. (Note: If you have a 2.6.22+ kernel, see next section instead.)
$cat /proc/acpi/alarm 2005-**-29 10:10:04
Check that you can write a new time to the RTC Clock Alarm (you will need to be Root) Format is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
#echo "2005-12-29 10:10:04" >/proc/acpi/alarm
Check that it was written, shut down and wait for it to wakeup.
#cat /proc/acpi/alarm 2005-*12-29 10:10:04 #shutdown -h now
Note: You may not see the change in the bios, but it should still work
Now go to Mythtv-Setup and setup wakeup and shutdown parameters.
Using /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
Beginning with kernel 2.6.22 /proc/acpi/alarm has been removed and replaced with /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm. The key differences with the wakealarm interface are:
- Instead of accepting a formatted time, wakealarm accepts the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970.
- If you want to change the wakealarm time, you first need to reset the time.
- You have to make sure that your bios clock is set to UTC time not localtime otherwise it will wakeup at the wrong time
This acpi-alarm script will function with the new sys wakealarm interface or the old acpi/alarm interface
#!/bin/sh
# $1 is the --settime switch that nvram-wakeup normally expects
# $2 is the date/time in seconds since 1970
DATE=`date -d "1970-01-01 $2 sec" "+%F %H:%M:%S" -u`
SECS=`date -d "1970-01-01 $2 sec" "+%s" -u`
# Save the wakeup time
echo "$*" > /myth.wakeup.args
echo $DATE > /myth.wakeup.time
echo $SECS > /myth.wakeup.secs
if [ -e /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm ]; then
echo 0 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
echo $SECS > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
fi
if [ -e /proc/acpi/alarm ]; then
echo $DATE > /proc/acpi/alarm
fi
If leaving the RTC wakeup alarm on the BIOS worked with the old interface, you may need to disable it when migrating to the new interface.
Warning: The wakealarm interface is incompatible with the kernel's old "Enhanced Real Time Clock Support" and "Generic /dev/rtc emulation" options. If your kernel was built with these enabled your kernel log will contain messages such as rtc_cmos: probe of 00:03 failed with error -16The solution is to rebuild your kernel with the above two options excluded (find them under Drivers -> Character Devices) and the various RTC interfaces (found under Drivers -> Real Time Clock) included. From a .config point of view CONFIG_RTC and CONFIG_GEN_RTC must be unset and, at a minimum, RTC_INTF_SYSFS must be set.
Note: If you can't find /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm, and you're running a modular kernel, it might be the case that the correct module is not loaded. In that case, make sure the rtc module is unloaded, and then load the rtc-cmos module: rmmod rtc modprobe rtc-cmos
Troubleshooting
Getting autostart using alarm can be quite frustrating. Here's some tips on getting it working.
UTC Bios Clock
Remember, your bios time might be in UTC rather than local time using:
# echo "+00-00-00 00:05:00" > /proc/acpi/alarm
will set the wakeup time to 5 minute from now, regardless of whether the RTC is in UTC or locatltime.
Since the wake-up time given by mythtv to the mythtv wakeup command is in local time, you need to do some bash handling of the obtained time to be able to setup the wakeup time in the bios in UTC (independent of daylight savings time and such). The following bash code might help here:
#!/bin/bash stamp_file=/home/mythtv/timestamp echo $1\ $2 > $stamp_file # If using mythwelcome you can try the next line instead on the one above. #echo $1 | sed "s/T/ /" >$stamp_file # Read the date in the locale time format and add the time-zone info to the stamp_file datum=$(/bin/date -f $stamp_file +%F\ %T\ %z) echo $datum > $stamp_file # reinterpret this in utc and write to alarm utcdatum=$(/bin/date -u -f $stamp_file +%F\ %T) echo $utcdatum > $stamp_file #rm -f $stamp_file #echo $utcdatum >/proc/acpi/alarm
As you noticed the echo to the acpi-alarm is commented out by default, because it is really better to check first if everything is working correctly (time format the same on your bios and such).
An alternative script to the above is the following:
#!/bin/bash
stamp_file=/home/mythtv/timestamp
#just log what we get as command line parameters
echo $1 $2 $3> $stamp_file
#i setted mythtv to output the number of seconds since epoch
#so i calculate the number of hours, minutes and seconds from
#now the computer has to wakeup:
sfn=$(($2 - `date +"%s"`))
#and then send it to /proc/acpi/wakeup in the format we saw above
y=`(echo $(($sfn - 3600))|awk '{print strftime("+00-00-00 %H:%M:%S", $1)}')`
echo "$y">/proc/acpi/alarm
echo "$y">>$stamp_file
echo "executed at `date`" >> $stamp_file
exit
This works on a lot of different EPIA and ASUS Motherboards, and is not dependent on the timezone you use in the bios.
Fussy Bios
Issue with hardware clock updated
Some motherboard bioses are extremely fussy when setting the wake up alarm. These bioses refuse to wake up if the hardware clock is modified after the alarm timer has been set. Most linux distributions do this by default when shutting down (they write the current system time back to the hardware clock). This causes the system never to wake up.
Hence check your shutdown scripts!
Under ubuntu/debian modifying /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh with the following will fix this problem:
stop|restart|reload|force-reload)
==> ACPITIME=`cat /proc/acpi/alarm`
if [ "$HWCLOCKACCESS" != no ]
then
if [ "$VERBOSE" != no ]
then
echo "Saving the System Clock time to the Hardware Clock..."
fi
[ "$GMT" = "-u" ] && GMT="--utc"
/sbin/hwclock --systohc $GMT $BADYEAR
if [ "$VERBOSE" != no ]
then
echo "Hardware Clock updated to `date`."
fi
==> echo "$ACPITIME" > /proc/acpi/alarm
Under Fedora Core 6 modifying /etc/init.d/halt with the following will fix this problem:
==> ACPITIME=`cat /proc/acpi/alarm`
[ -x /sbin/hwclock ] && action $"Syncing hardware clock to system time" /sbin/hwclock $CLOCKFLAGS
==> echo "$ACPITIME" > /proc/acpi/alarm
On openSUSE, /etc/sysconfig/clock holds a switch to write back system time to the hardware clock
==> SYSTOHC="yes"
# Is set to "yes" write back the system time to the hardware
# clock at reboot or shutdown. Usefull if hardware clock is
# much more inaccurate than system clock. Set to "no" if
# system time does it wrong due e.g. missed timer interrupts.
# If set to "no" the hardware clock adjust feature is also
# skipped because it is rather useless without writing back
# the system time to the hardware clock.
==> SYSTOHC="no"
Set acpi time two times
For some motherboards, like the MS-6760 (MSI MEGA 651), it is required that you set the wakeup time two times, otherwise it will not wake up.
#echo "2005-12-29 10:10:04" >/proc/acpi/alarm && sleep 1 && echo "2005-12-29 10:10:04" >/proc/acpi/alarm
More glitch
Another possible glitch is, that the option 'Resume By Alarm' (or whatever it is called) is set to Enabled but wake up using /proc/acpi/alarm only works if the option is set to Disabled. Sounds weird but works with some boards.
Additional source of info
Extra Information
Activating ACPI support when compiling your own kernel
The setup of /proc/acpi/alarm is done in kernel file drivers/acpi/sleep/proc.c and controlled by the CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP_PROC_FS flag. You can test support for you architecture by going to you kernel source and do:
$grep -r CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP_PROC_FS arch/* arch/x86_64/defconfig:CONFIG_ACPI_SLEEP_PROC_FS=y
Note: To enable acpi-sleep in the kernel, it is necessary to set "Support for hot-pluggable CPUs
( Processor type and features ---> [*] Support for hot-pluggable CPUs) so that "CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU=y" in the ".config" file. After this it is possible to set ([*] Sleep States) under ACPI support.
User experience
Moosylog - March 2007: Works fine with MSI RS482M-IL and openSUSE 10.2 after I made the following change to /etc/sysconfig/clock.....SYSTOHC="yes" to SYSTOHC="no".
Turpie: Works great with the Asus M2NPV-VM. Rad: Yep, but needs a recent bios version
Murph - April 2007: Works also great with the Legend QDI Advance 5/133E.
mythwog: No problems with ECS PT890T-A. Simply wrote wake up time to /proc/acpi/alarm, halted, and system wakes up.
Fuchur - August 2007: Had to replace the wakeup script with the one from http://www.mythwiki.de/index.php?title=HOWTO_Mythwelcome as my mythshutdown produces another time format. Otherwise it seems to work so far.
Mattwire - September 2007: Works fine with MSI K8NGM2-FID and NC6120 laptop running Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy. Both require modification to /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh to save the wakeup time.
Dumdideldum - September 2007: Works with Epox 8rda+ running Ubuntu Feisty. It is important to disable the wakeup on rtc in the Bios and editing the /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh as described in the Ubuntu guide linked in the section below.
Pkendall - September 2007: Works fine with MSI K9NBPM2-FID running Ubuntu Feisty. As above, edit the hwclock.sh file and make sure Bios RTC wakeup is disabled.
Jmwislez - September 2007: Problem with ASUS P5GD1 motherboard (BIOS v1.014). Writing 'echo "2007-09-09 14:15:00" > /proc/acpi/alarm' works perfectly, reading via 'cat /proc/acpi/alarm' yields the expected '2007-09-09 14:15:00', but the system doesn't start at the specified time. After a manually initiated boot, 'cat /proc/acpi/alarm' yields '2007-09-00 14:15:00', with '00' for the day.
Thewizzard - October 2007: Works with MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR, be sure to use the hwclock.sh script and have it set the time two times.
Spitzbub - December 2007: Works with Biostar NF325-A7, be sure to modify your /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh script (or equivalent) to set the wake-up time again after the --systohc, as described above under Fussy Bios.
