Power managment by BIOS or through Linux

On my old Notebook. The BIOS was very extensive it provided temperature info. Power management settings. So I simply disabled ACPI in linux config
and allowed the bios to handle the power management stuff

Now
I have recently bought a Lenovo and the BIOS has very provides limited info. Is it still safe allow the bios handle all the ACPI? Anybody have a suggestion
on what to enable in the Linux config? Cpu scaling? etc

 

You're opening a can of worms with that question...

Typically the motherboard companies are starting to lean towards having the OS controlling all of that (especially if your laptop comes with Vista to start). Many of the Vista laptops/pc's will use the OS's power throttling.

I'd leave Linux's acpi alone and perhaps setup a fan controller daemon. You could optimize the CPU Scaling too, but that can get messy fast.

 

Thanks to a couple of guys from the distro I am using. I was able to get
ACPI going and now I can control the clock speed. I simply set it to the
lowest clock that will not feel sluggish.

I really dont like hanlding the ACPI stuff my self so usually just set the BOIS
to powersaving mode all the the time.

prysm

 

Now, I only have experience with intel CPUs, but speedstep using cpufreqd was _very_ easy to set up..

 

ACPI has gotten better lately... I let ACPI manage the CPU speed on my media machine and laptop, and I don't notice any lagging. It drops down to 1GHz when it's not being used, and they crank up (instantly) when the CPU starts being utilized. Best of both worlds.