How to turn off graphics to save energy?

[perja]

but let the rest of the machine run..
I have tried the s2ram and vbetool programs,
but not figured out howto do it,
you can pass the option "vgastate off, dpms off" to vbetool but it doesnt work.
or maybe you could write something to /proc/sys/kernel/acpi_video_flags
but what?
or is there some other way?
I have an ion machine with GeForce 9400M and run ubuntu 64bit
thanks

[Ubuntaqua]

Originally Posted by perja

but let the rest of the machine run..
I have tried the s2ram and vbetool programs,
but not figured out howto do it,
you can pass the option "vgastate off, dpms off" to vbetool but it doesnt work.
or maybe you could write something to /proc/sys/kernel/acpi_video_flags
but what?
or is there some other way?
I have an ion machine with GeForce 9400M and run ubuntu 64bit
thanks

Isn't there a sleep hibernate mode in Ubuntu ? background programs should still be working Or do you want to turn the video chip off but not hte rest of the machine ? What would be the difference ?

btw, what ION motherboard did you choose ? how does it fare compared with your expectations? (I'm very interested in buying one also).

[perja]

I have an acer revo machine, and it plays video well, but the cpu isnt very strong,
overall i'm happy with it, but it's not silent, the machine consumes 35-40w,
so the fan spins quite loudly, thats why i want to turn off the graphics, which
should be the major part of that, the cpu just uses 4w..

I don't know if ubuntu has a sleep mode, how do i enable it in that case?

"background programs should still be working Or do you want to turn the video chip off but not hte rest of the machine ? What would be the difference ?"

Yes as i wrote, i want to turn off the graphics chip but still let the rest of the machine be running including programs, but i dont need X programs to be running, just "background" programs is enough, i.e. console applications

[mooninite]

AFAIK there is no way to power down the GPU. nVidia would have to provide such a facility in their hardware and driver. I believe this stuff is coming as I hear hints of power gates (what's in the Nehalem) are coming to GPUs.

The best you can do is use adaptive clocking. It sounds like your 2D speed setting is too high so you might edit your video BIOS and downclock/downvolt the 2D speed.

[Ubuntaqua]

Originally Posted by mooninite

AFAIK there is no way to power down the GPU. nVidia would have to provide such a facility in their hardware and driver. I believe this stuff is coming as I hear hints of power gates (what's in the Nehalem) are coming to GPUs.

The best you can do is use adaptive clocking. It sounds like your 2D speed setting is too high so you might edit your video BIOS and downclock/downvolt the 2D speed.

Isn't that what powermizer is supposed to accomplish ? Or maybe I missed something.
A simple script with nvidia-setting should be enough to set the GPU frequency even lower.

[mooninite]

Originally Posted by Ubuntaqua

Isn't that what powermizer is supposed to accomplish ? Or maybe I missed something.
A simple script with nvidia-setting should be enough to set the GPU frequency even lower.

You could try to use coolbits, but that only works within X. Powermizer is a series of performance levels. The performance levels are set in the BIOS. You cannot permanently change the GPU/RAM frequencies of each performance level without editing the BIOS.