pm-utils: power.d/disable_wol won't work by default as it requires ethtool to work

[Colin Ian King]

I've been measuring power savings on the pm-utils power.d scripts and found that /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/disable_wol does not work on a default install because it depends on ethtool which isn't installed by default.

So, should we considering installing ethtool in as a dependency or should we overlook this broken functionality?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

http://zinc.canonical.com/~cking/power-benchmarking/pm-utils-results/results.txt says that it's not actually helping measurably to reduce power consumption. I suppose for that test you actually had ethtool installed? If it does help to save power, I'm happy to seed it.

[Colin Ian King (colin-king)]

Well, if ethtool isn't going to consume lots of space then I'm happy for it to be seeded too. The moot point is that it doesn't appear to save much power (the measurements were close to the noise levels of the readings). So, it's one of those cases that either we seed it and it works as expected (and doesn't do much), or we don't seed it and it doesn't work as expected. Either way it's not a big change in final power consumption out come.