Lowering OMV Power Consumption in an Asus F2A85-M Board

Hello!

I have been testing an Asus F2A85-M motherboard with an A10-5700 APU and 8 GB of RAM with the various open source NAS software available (principally OMV, FreeNAS, and NAS4Free). Of all three, so far I prefer OMV. The problem I am encountering with this setup and all software is that power consumption is too high. OMV has the lowest at ~44w, Nas4Free goes up to ~49w, while FreeNAS chugs >70w. I need my setup to be below 30w in idle. I tried setting the power management option in OMV to no avail. Any suggestions about tweaks in the BIOS for this board or things that could be done from within OMV to fix this? Sad thing is that in Windows Storage Server 2012 I get ~25w idle with no modifications to the BIOS. I want something like this with OMV as I definitely prefer it over WSS. These parts I will be using to build an HTPC, but I am using them now for testing the A85X chipset and AMD APU in a NAS setting, the goal being purchasing an AsRock FM2 A85X mITX board and similar APU.

Zitat von "tekkbebe"

The kernel is part of the issue. Your hardware, motherboard & cpu, is quite advanced vs. the kernel that omv is using. When OMV .6 comes out many issues will most likely be resolved but this will not be for some time, OMV .5 is not even out yet. The cpu is part of the problem as well. It is not exactly a low power cpu, 65watt tdp. Do you want the machine running 24/7? There are other options if you are willing to shut the machine down for x hours per day. This would bring down the average daily consumption.

Thanks for your reply. The reason I chose this platform is mostly due to the motherboard mITX form factor, the number of SATA 6Gbps ports, and cost. I know Intel has 35w Ivy Bridge cpus, but a motherboard with as many SATA 6Gbps ports is nonexistent. I am willing to explore other hardware that offers similar specs. I would also not have any issues with putting the system to sleep and using WoL to power it back from sleep.

Zitat von "tekkbebe"

You can set the machine when to turn off now at /system /power management then on right click on shutdown/reboot schedule. This would handle a scheduled shutdown. Also, there is the autoshutdown plugin which will shutdown/sleep the machine when not in use.

To start you can use wol or a scheduled power on with a cron rtcwake job (hopefully this will be a new feature at some point in the web-gui).

Thank you for the options you indicated. I haven't been able to undervolt this setup to lower power consumption. As my hardware will be used for an HTPC, I still have some flexibility regarding the NAS hardware. I was thinking of an Asus P8H77-I matched with a 35w i3-3220T cpu as a potential alternative. Are you able to offer any hardware suggestions so that I can obtain a low 24/7 power consumption?

They do not necessarily need to be 6Gbps ports. I would, however, prefer to have 7 SATA ports. The reasoning being that I want 3 sets of mirrored arrays plus an extra port just in case my OMV setup fails, my patience runs out, or just want more options. For instance, power consumption is an issue and I have had no luck lowering it with the setup I mentioned above. If I get 6 SATA ports and my OMV, Nas4Free, FreeNas setup does not work, then I'll probably have to drop one of the mirrored sets so I can have a dedicated hard drive for Windows Server Essentials 2012 or Windows Storage Server 2012, which both pull just 25w with my setup. I would still prefer an OMV solution but I have no clue how to set it up for low power consumption like tekkbebe mentioned above. Like he mentioned, the kernel of all these systems is part of the issue. My concern with the E35M1-I is its ability to handle that many drives or a WSE 2012 installation. I have read accounts from people stating the E-350 is a bottleneck in their NAS system.

Thanks seti for your reply. I guess I need all the help I can get trying out OMV on this platform. I am not too familiar with what I am dealing with here, but I am always up to a challenge. If I can have your support then that would be great. I have two spare HDDs so I will setup the system for its intended purpose (OpenELEC HTPC) and will have the other HDD available to play with OMV. As I mentioned, I still have not purchased the hardware for the NAS but am trying this to see how much I can get out of it and hopefully be able to get a MB with sufficient SATA ports. So, where shall I start?

Zitat von "seti"

ok, so you havent purchased any hardware for the NAS?
On what hardware are u testing?
OR you havent purchased any new hardware?
can we do tests on a testing hardware?
what about your linux knowledge?

Hi seti. About a month ago I purchased an Asus F2A85-M motherboard with an A10-5700 APU and 8 GB of RAM destined for an HTPC. I want to test OMV on this setup to see how power efficient a system I can obtain and also to basically get a feel of the NAS software that's out there (OMV, NAS4Free, FreeNAS, WSE 2012, etc.). I am inclined to buy AMD for the NAS due to the number of SATA ports on their MBs. However, the Ivy Bridge 35w CPUs look attractive in terms of TDP. For now I want to see what I can do with this hardware that I have and then decide if I'll get something similar (most likely mITX) or go with a totally different setup. So basically just testing for now.

We can test on this hardware. I already have a HDD with OpenELEC on it for the HTPC, but I'll hook up another spare drive to do the OMV testing and revert to the OpenELEC one when done. No need to for dual boot or anything like that.

My linux experience is next to none. But since I have an IT background I can certainly learn what's needed on the way.

Right now I have an empty HDD and an empty USB flash drive ready for OMV.

Zitat von "tekkbebe"

ravennevar, you can run openelec without harddrive using PXE-boot and TFTP. I think Solo has a guide on the forum somewhere. Thought u might be interested. I'll try to put link later.

Thanks for the suggestion. Feel free to post a link when you have a chance.

Zitat von "seti"

OK, i have tested a little bit with NAS4Free and FreeNas at the weekend.
Power Usage on this might be bad because of "powerd" is disabled by default.
This is the Service with controlls frequencies and vcore, etc.
If you are testing the Powerusage aktive powerd its usually in the the webgui, "generall setup -> advanced settings" or like this (its out of my head now )

I'm going to buy a power analyzer today, doing same things, checking power usage of the sys and on the other side checking performance with the low power c60m1-i asus board, with this 3 softwares.

If you are Setting up OMV first of all get the 64Bit ISO and do a default installation.
if you want to test if there is the powerusage changed with new kernels i will help u if you are done.

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Thanks seti. I have a Kill-a-Watt analyzer and it is very accurate. I have tried the powerd options but the kernel is unable to set the lower cpu state on this AMD APU. I will install the x64 version of OMV and we can test new kernels (obviously with your help as I have no clue, lol). Thanks again for your support with this.

Zitat von "ryecoaaron"

Kernel support for the Trinity APU didn't start until 3.4. While the support is for the gpu part, it may have a lot to do with powerd too. I'm not sure if the Squeeze Backports 3.2 kernel has support backported. You will probably have to compile your own kernel (plenty sites out there showing how to do that).

Thanks for your reply ryecoaaron. Do you know if there will be or is support for the cpu part in a beta kernel?

Zitat von "seti"

first of all, i was testing nas4free yesterday. the cpu scaling works fine for me.
the setup: activate powerd, using adaptiv insted of hiadaptive as governor.
nas4free is based on freebsd 9.1 (as far as i know released in dec 2012), freenas is based on 8.3 maybe its to old to do the powermanagement for the apu.
i have tested it with the live usb image. so i was not needet to install it on the disk and overwrite the omv installation.

on omv as told previously i'm using testing repository with 3.2 kernel, but on the net c60m1-i i tested the kernel 3.8 from experimental repo.
the kernel works fine. no bugs as far as i could see this till now.
the experimental is not a full distro, you can just pull out some pakages you want to try, so i'm on testing repo (wich is going to get stable at the moment) with the newer kernel.

are you familiar with console usage?
there are a few things to do on the console to get to the testing/unstable repo.
are you in the omv irc channel?

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Hi seti. I have been testing Nas4Free in an embedded install on a HDD. So far I have set powerd and used adaptive. It does not work. I get "set freq failed. err 6". Weird thing is when this setting is in place the system uses about 4 more watts. Even if I go to to the minimum setting it still does not work for the same reason. Maybe I should ask in the Nas4Free forums to see if they have any further input. But any ideas from your part are welcome. Maybe there is a new kernel that does provide this support.

My OMV x64 is installed in another hard drive. Ready for some guidance. In terms of console usage I have some idea but not very familiar. Obviously, if I get the list of commands I need to type plus how to access the console I am sure I can do it. So far I am not in the OMV irc channel but could get on as soon as I find out the info.

Zitat von "SerErris"

Maybe you should consider to buy a cheap SATA controller with 4 ports or a port multiplier.
The speed is not an issue normally as you are anyhow limited to 1Gbit/s networks. That would widen the possibilities for your mainboard.

Thanks SerErris. This is certainly an option which I am open to. I can live with 6 ports. So if the motherboard supports that, then fine. If needed, I could add a controller card. The board would still need to be mITX as I would like to use the Fractal Design Node 304 case. Any suggestions?

I found this: http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabb…tate-calls-td5709583.html

Seems to be relevant to the AMD APU power state issue. I only understand about 50% of what they are talking about but know you can build a custom kernel to deal with this.