[Solved] High power consumption of eth0

ToshiroTaicho · 2013-02-15 14:48:32

Hi everyone,

i successfully installed Arch on my new Acer Travelmate P653-MG a few months ago with the Gnome DE. Everything worked fine until a few weeks ago, when i discovered a really hard power regression due to my network interface. Before i had a solid 12 W of power consumption (without that much of finetuning), but afterwards my power consumption jumped to 23-25 W. I have attached two screenshots of my current powertop output:
http://i.imgur.com/8tpSnXf.png

http://i.imgur.com/CaVg61A.png

Unfortunately i can't quite say when this regression occured, so as to point to a certain update. My first guess was, this had to be kernel specific, but the downgrade from kernel 3.7 to 3.6 brought no results. I must admit after hours of searching google, the arch wiki and the forum here, i'm at a complete loss. I have discovered no one with a similar problem.

If anyone can help me in this matter, your help would be very much appreciated!

My current kernel parameters are: quiet splash nmi_watchdog=0 acpi_osi=linux acpi_backlight=vendor

Please tell me any outputs i can provide which could be of help to you.

Greetings

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Last edited by ToshiroTaicho (2013-02-16 22:08:07)

lucke · 2013-02-15 15:05:22

Try linux-lts.

eruditorum · 2013-02-15 16:11:27

Wow! Is it ever possible for network card to consume so much energy?!

the sad clown · 2013-02-15 23:46:36

That is crazy. Have you tried just unloading the module if you aren't using it?

ToshiroTaicho · 2013-02-16 22:07:25

Thanks for your suggestions, but i was finally able to figure it out myself. linux-lts was unfortunately no option for me, as i want to use bumblebee. But the direction, this pointed me to was good. It seems one of the kernel updates broke my bumblebee package, so the power management didnt work and the card was constantly powered on. This was nothing new, but my powertop completely messed it up, by adding this additional power consumption to eth0. Funny enough, this power consumption even disappeared, when i unloaded eth0. After deleting powertops saved results and recalibrating it, it now shows up all components power usage correctly.
Thus i mark this thread as SOLVED.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-02-15 14:48:32

[Solved] High power consumption of eth0

#2 2013-02-15 15:05:22

Re: [Solved] High power consumption of eth0

#3 2013-02-15 16:11:27

Re: [Solved] High power consumption of eth0

#4 2013-02-15 23:46:36

Re: [Solved] High power consumption of eth0

#5 2013-02-16 22:07:25

Re: [Solved] High power consumption of eth0

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