AMD Athlon Powersavings on Debian

On 2.4 kernels on Debian, there is a driver that enables better powersavings for AMD760MP and AMD-760MPX (usually found on multi-processors mainboards such as Tyan S2460, S2462 and S2469) chipsets: amd76x_pm. It also exists as patch for the 2.6 kernel, but as it is non-standard, it is not included in Debian kernels packages.

To use it, simply add the following line to the end of your /etc/modules

amd76x_pm

To load it without rebooting, simply type the following command as root

# modprobe amd76x_pm

Warning: Doing this on a Tyan S2469 running Debian Sarge with kernel 2.4.27-1-k7-smp will result in hanging the machine!

Use fgetty instead of getty on Debian

Getty is known to be memory-hungry. Let's replace it with something lighter, which works in most cases: fgetty On Debian Sarge and up, it is already packaged, so sudo apt-get install fgetty will do the trick. But this is not sufficent for it to be installed instead of getty.

You will have to edit /etc/inittab. Warning: this is a very dangerous file to edit, as it may render your system unbootable. You have been warned!

The following lines call getty

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
...
Lets replace it with fgetty, which takes less arguments

1:23:respawn:/sbin/fgetty tty1
2:23:respawn:/sbin/fgetty tty2
...

And do that for as many virtual consoles you would like to have. If you don't need many, comment the lines, but we advise you to keep at least 2.

Save the file and exit.

And then, restart init

# killall -HUP init