Hello,
I am using an up to date CentOS 6 x86_64 laptop (Thinkpad X220t) and after struggling a bit I could install it a few months ago with a pure EFI boot.
However, I am not really satisfied with such things as stability, power consumption, etc. and now that I have a little more time I want to investigate these issues thoroughly.
So, my questions are:
- Does EFI impacts other things than the boot sequence? (a friend of mine told me that this is a complete replacement of BIOS, and thus impacts "everything")
- Could it change (improve?) stability, power consumption, etc. if I would reinstall CentOS 6 using the traditional boot? (or is it just a legacy wrapper around an EFI "BIOS"?)
Thanks in advance for your advice or for providing more details about what you know about EFI pro and cons!
Cheers,
Mathieu
On 15.10.2012 09:31, Mathieu Baudier wrote:
Hello,
I am using an up to date CentOS 6 x86_64 laptop (Thinkpad X220t) and after struggling a bit I could install it a few months ago with a pure EFI boot.
However, I am not really satisfied with such things as stability, power consumption, etc. and now that I have a little more time I want to investigate these issues thoroughly.
So, my questions are:
- Does EFI impacts other things than the boot sequence? (a friend of
mine told me that this is a complete replacement of BIOS, and thus impacts "everything")
- Could it change (improve?) stability, power consumption, etc. if I
would reinstall CentOS 6 using the traditional boot? (or is it just a legacy wrapper around an EFI "BIOS"?)
Thanks in advance for your advice or for providing more details about what you know about EFI pro and cons!
Hello Mathieu,
Not sure about the EFI as I'm avoiding it as the plague, but on Intel platforms there are some issues regarding power consumption. Here's what I do: http://www.nux.ro/archive/2012/10/EL6_power_usage_optimisation_on_Intel_Sand...
Hi,
Not sure about the EFI as I'm avoiding it as the plague, but on Intel platforms there are some issues regarding power consumption. Here's what I do: http://www.nux.ro/archive/2012/10/EL6_power_usage_optimisation_on_Intel_Sand...
that article looks quite out of date, tuned for example will handle quite a few things - and powertop can be used to tune accessories up as well.
Depends on what one is tuning for.
eg. i dont need the wwan interface most of the time, so loading the driver and powering it down is more productive than what most people do : dont load the driver till its needed
On 15.10.2012 10:45, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Hi,
Not sure about the EFI as I'm avoiding it as the plague, but on Intel platforms there are some issues regarding power consumption. Here's what I do:
http://www.nux.ro/archive/2012/10/EL6_power_usage_optimisation_on_Intel_Sand...
that article looks quite out of date, tuned for example will handle quite a few things
Why outdated? I just wrote it! :-)) Anyway, I edited it and included mentions to Powertop and Jupiter.
Any other suggestions?
On 10/15/2012 03:21 AM, Nux! wrote:
Why outdated? I just wrote it! :-))
I've tested those directions on a new Thinkpad (T430s) after finding them posted in many places and found no measurable power use difference.
Using powertop, however, does produce significant improvements.
The most important thing to know about powertop is that it does not make permanent changes. If you get good improvements from powertop, save the HTML report from the program. The HTML report will have a table containing commands that enact the changes that powertop suggests. You can Ctrl+click and drag to select those cells (at least in Firefox) and paste them into a shell script that you can run on boot.
Hi,
On 10/15/2012 09:31 AM, Mathieu Baudier wrote:
I am using an up to date CentOS 6 x86_64 laptop (Thinkpad X220t) and after struggling a bit I could install it a few months ago with a pure EFI boot.
Are you sure it wasent doing a bios failback ? I'd be surprised to see a device like that with exclusive uEFI support ( although, I know lots of people run CentOS 6 on MacBook Air's and Macbook's of various shapes / sizes, which have no bios mode )
So, my questions are:
- Does EFI impacts other things than the boot sequence? (a friend of
mine told me that this is a complete replacement of BIOS, and thus impacts "everything")
to some extent yes, but once the machine is running and dmi stuff has been setup, there would be little impact
- Could it change (improve?) stability, power consumption, etc. if I
would reinstall CentOS 6 using the traditional boot? (or is it just a legacy wrapper around an EFI "BIOS"?)
its the same grub, running with different paths. There should be no stability impact as far as I can tell.
Thanks in advance for your advice or for providing more details about what you know about EFI pro and cons!
I've switched over everything that is capable of running uEFI to uEFI modes ( including my HP EliteBook laptop ) - and dont have any stability or performance issues ( that I've noticed anyway ).
On 10/15/2012 01:31 AM, Mathieu Baudier wrote:
- Does EFI impacts other things than the boot sequence? (a friend of
mine told me that this is a complete replacement of BIOS, and thus impacts "everything")
EFI will primarily impact driver initialization. If you saw a problem, it would be during the kernel startup, before the init process began, or during suspend and resume. It shouldn't impact power use or stability in general.
- Could it change (improve?) stability, power consumption, etc. if I
would reinstall CentOS 6 using the traditional boot? (or is it just a legacy wrapper around an EFI "BIOS"?)
The EFI firmware provides a legacy BIOS wrapper.
-
Gordon Messmer -
Karanbir Singh -
Mathieu Baudier -
Nux!