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dr3amyxen0

Member

Registered: 2018-02-21

Posts: 19

[SOLVED] [HP] Battery life degradation

Hi,

I got myself a new HP Probook 430 G4 (i5-7200U version) half a year ago and installed Arch on it right away. Using different power management tools available (namely, thermald, cpupower and laptop-mode) I managed to get its battery to last 5-6 hours which is enough for my university studies and stuff. However a large system update or two ago (I think I went from kernel 4.18.5/6 to 4.18.9) the battery life reduced drastically and now I get only about 3 hours. A few things I noticed: now htop shows at least one core loaded 100% all the time and more importantly the fan starts spinning like crazy a few minutes after I boot up the laptop (it used to start and stop from time to time a few months ago before I stopped paying attention to it). I'm pretty sure some of my power management tweaks stopped working hence this strange behavior. I use KDE as my daily driver and set my screen brightness and hibernation related settings in its dedicated module for convenience.

Some additional info:

$ cpupower frequency-info          
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency:  Cannot determine or is not supported.
  hardware limits: 400 MHz - 3.10 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 1.80 GHz and 2.50 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 2.50 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes 

$ sensors                                   
pch_skylake-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +45.5°C  

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +53.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp2:         +0.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp3:        +40.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp4:        +39.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp5:        +32.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)
temp6:       +127.0°C  (crit = +128.0°C)

iwlwifi-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +38.0°C  

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0:  +54.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:        +49.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:        +54.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

Couldn't get lm_sensors to show fan rpm, but still. As for the laptop-mode-tools daemon, I only used intel-hda-powersave, sched-mc-power-savings, sched-smt-power-savings, terminal-blanking and wireless-power plugins with pretty much default settings. All of the aforementioned tools were configured as systemd services. I tried disabling every one of them, and after cpupower stopped the fan started spinning even louder than before (who would have thought). If you could point me at something I should look at further I will greatly appreciate it. Otherwise the problem might be hardware-related but I doubt it would've shown up like this.

Last edited by dr3amyxen0 (2018-09-30 22:03:38)

dr3amyxen0

Member

Registered: 2018-02-21

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] [HP] Battery life degradation

So the problem was somehow related to lo_kde5filepicker. For some reason it managed to auto-start and load up the processor 100% according to htop.