ACPI Wakeup
| System Wakeup |
Contents
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.
Testing ACPI Wakeup Works
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.
$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.
Kernel 2.6.22+ and /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. This will affect Fedora 7 users. 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.
Trouble Shooting
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`" >> $stamp_file
exit
This works on a lot of different EPIA and ASUS Motherboards, and is not dependent on the timezone you use in the bios.
Fussy Bios
Some motherboard bioses are extremely fussy when setting the wake up alarm. These bioses refuse to wake up if the hardware clock is modified after the alarm timer has been set. Most linux distributions do this by default when shutting down (they write the current system time back to the hardware clock). This causes the system never to wake up.
Hence check your shutdown scripts!
Under ubuntu/debian modifying /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh with the following will fix this problem:
stop|restart|reload|force-reload)
==> ACPITIME=`cat /proc/acpi/alarm`
if [ "$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
Tip: 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
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.
User experience
spent hours on ACPI on his MSI RS482M-IL board. Not working, system never wakes-up. (march 2007)
Turpie: Works great with the Asus M2NPV-VM.
Murph 09:03, 20 April 2007 (UTC)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 00:52, 13 August 2007 (UTC) 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 04 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 06 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 09 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 09 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.
Additional source of info
Extra Information
Background to Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI)
The PC Industry have been moving from the older APM power managment specification to the newer ACPI specification. If your computer has a BIOS date more recent than 1999 and you are using a 2.6 kernel then ACPI support will most likely be enabled.
I have chosen to go with using ACPI to have my MythTV box wakeup while I am away , record a programme and then power itself back down. You will find the ACPI features for your machine exposed as a collection of files and directories in /proc/acpi. For instance /proc/acpi/alarm is a file that corresponds to the Real Time Clock wakeup function on your machine.
Note that beginning with Linux kernel 2.6.22, /proc/acpi/alarm has been deprecated and replaced with /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm.
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.
