Here’s an fascinating bit of research study to find out of Microsoft as well as UCSD. The Somniloquy job is a new type of network interface. It’s a USB gadget that enables a computer to continue network communications after being put to sleep. By offloading these tasks, machines that would normally stay awake for RDP as well as data transfers are only powered up when absolutely necessary. The gadget utilizes a Gumstix board like the one utilized in the Tor hardware adapter. The gadget pictured above has two USB interfaces, however the second is just for debugging as well as not needed for appropriate operation. The board runs BSD as well as produces a USBNet bridge to the Vista host. When the hold daemon detects the computer going to sleep, it hands off active communication to the gumstix. They established “stub” applications to handle the different kinds of communication. For downloads, they utilized wget to download only the part of the data that was still left. For bittorrent, they personalized the command line client ctorrent to handle the download. Both programs get up the PC upon completion as well as transfer the data off of the SD card.
[via Engadget]