Arch Linux

kmani314

Member

Registered: 2021-02-19

Posts: 13

Dell XPS 9310 power management issues

Hello,
I'm running the latest kernel on a Dell XPS 9310 (late 2020, Intel 11th gen Tiger Lake) and I'm having some issues with audio codec power management when using an HDMI display. In powertop, the audio codec is consistently listed as the top consumer even though it's not in use:

  500 mW    100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D2: Intel

I've looked at other forum posts about turning on codec power management, but it's already turned on for me:

   Good          Enable Audio codec power management

I've also made sure that this is reflected in /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save and the related files.

It doesn't go away when I quit pulseaudio either. If it's any help, I'm using Xwayland and my main audio sources are Spotify (running in X mode) and ungoogled-chromium (running in native wayland mode). However, no audio was playing when I did these tests. Critically, it is fine when I disconnect the HDMI display.

Also, I'm not really sure what these are coming from, but these other two entries in powertop make up the bulk of the power usage:

  643 mW      3.6 ms/s     161.4        Interrupt      [40] idma64.1
  521 mW      2.2 ms/s     131.1        Timer          tick_sched_timer

Are these quirks of support for the latest intel chips not being mature in the mainline kernel, or is there something I can do to fix these things? This laptop is supposed to get more than 12hrs of battery life, but it's only getting about 5 because of these and various other problems.