WiFi powersaving

Copycat · 2012-07-30 14:29:25

How can I turn on power saving on the Intel Wireless Centrino 1000? Powertop say's that wifi module eat more than 10 watts, that's not good at all.

:::sudo iwconfig wlan0 power 5                                                                                        
Error for wireless request "Set Power Management" (8B2C) :
    SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.

:::lspci |grep -i centrino                                                                                       
08:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1000

:::uname -a                                                                                                   
Linux holy 3.4.6-1-ck #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Jul 22 10:03:07 EDT 2012 i686 GNU/Linux

nierro · 2012-07-30 15:03:48

Already tried with

sudo iwconfig wlan0 power on

??

Copycat · 2012-07-30 15:08:54

nierro wrote:

Already tried with
sudo iwconfig wlan0 power on
??

Yep, with no result.

Gusar · 2012-07-30 15:31:18

Install iw, then

iw wlan0 get power_save
iw wlan0 set power_save on

Copycat · 2012-07-30 15:37:05

Gusar wrote:

Install iw, then

iw wlan0 get power_save
iw wlan0 set power_save on

Passed with no errors, but the module continues to consume 10 watts

wander · 2012-08-02 17:17:33

I have a similar issue. The Intel Ultimate 6300 n in my T420s consumes about 6-7 Watt on idle and more than 10 Watt when fetching a website (according to powertop). This seems quite plausible since turning off wifi results in an equivalent drop of the systems' power consumption.

I am not sure when this behavior occurred the first but this hasn't been always this way.

Any idea how to narrow down this issue?

Copycat · 2012-08-03 12:04:41

Anyone else has that issue? I think we must report a bug to kernel bugzilla, do you think so?

wander · 2012-08-03 14:02:41

I did some further investigations and (at least on my system) powertops' estimations are incorrect. The remaining high power consumption I saw previous, despite turning off wifi, was probably just a coincidence - maybe browser or mailclient trying to connect to the internet and the system therefore going up in cpu utilization.

What's the power consumption of your system and do you have a switch on your notebook to enable/disable wifi? Try watching your power consumption via powertop or simply acpi command (remaining time) and then disable wifi. If wifi really consumes more than 5 Watts you should see a dramatic increase in remaining time and a drop of the equivalent amount of Watts in systems power consumption. I get a drop of merely ~1 Watt - this seems quite reasonable.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-07-30 14:29:25

WiFi powersaving

#2 2012-07-30 15:03:48

Re: WiFi powersaving

#3 2012-07-30 15:08:54

Re: WiFi powersaving

#4 2012-07-30 15:31:18

Re: WiFi powersaving

#5 2012-07-30 15:37:05

Re: WiFi powersaving

#6 2012-08-02 17:17:33

Re: WiFi powersaving

#7 2012-08-03 12:04:41

Re: WiFi powersaving

#8 2012-08-03 14:02:41

Re: WiFi powersaving

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