Battery drain problem on HP Folio 9470m

pete83 · 2013-11-17 11:28:01

Hello,

I'm relatively new to Arch, and installed my first "real" system a couple of days ago (base system with Gnome Shell, I love the minimalistic way :-) ). My Notebook is basically something similar to

http://www.hpshopping.co.nz/acquire/def … 0121&tab=0

I've read through the whole laptop and power saving Arch wiki articles and tried to apply all the tweaks to extend battery power, however I'm kind of stuck. According to powertop, the system drains around 12W per hour, and the battery life is about 4 hours, which seems too low (according to tests, the notebook lasted around 7 hours on windows with similar settings (only wifi and display around 40%))

If I check out powertop, all energy saving options are reported as "Good". Furthermore I see that the main consumer by far, is the display, which of course makes sense. But then, the second biggest one is the LAN network interface, (enp0s25, not sure why Arch doesn't name it eth0 like other distros?) which drains about half the amount of the display (the display drains around 2.8W, enp0s25 drains about 1.4W per hour). The wifi interface only drains around 100MW in comparison...
I don't understand, why. I have no cable connected to the LAN port, and I've disabled WOL like mentioned in the Arch wiki.
Is there any way, I can tell this device to go into power saving mode, or similar? I don't really want to deactivate it completely, but I'm confused, why it would need so much energy while being inactive anyway.

So I would be very grateful for any tip how I can push this down to the MW region (hopefully into the two digit MW region, since it's unused...)

Greetings,
Peter

socials · 2013-11-17 12:21:11

pete83 wrote:

(the display drains around 2.8W, enp0s25 drains about 1.4W per hour)

I'm wondering, where do you see such specifics? I'd like to see them too. My powertop output just shows usage percentages like this:

edit2:
Got it! I had to calibrate powertop and just let it run for an hour.

edit:
Also, 4 hours (draining 12W per hour) for your laptop seems about right. You can forget about those "review tests" where they say you'll get 7 hours with light browsing. I have no idea how they come up with those numbers. I read somewhere that my laptop (Vostro V131) should get 9 hours of screentime (are you kidding me). Of course, realistically it's actually up to about 5 hours.

As for squeezing some more battery life out of your machine, you can try setting up a power management solution like TLP. I think there's many features about suspending different devices etc.

Last edited by socials (2013-11-17 17:34:40)

pete83 · 2013-11-18 23:20:37

Hmm, maybe we're using a different version of powertop, if I start it, my output looks like

Summary: 257,9 wakeups/second, 10,8 GPU ops/seconds, 0,0 VFS ops/sec and 4,4% CPU use

Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
2.85 W 23,9% Device Display backlight
1.34 W 0,0 pkts/s Device Network interface: enp0s25 (e1000e)
210 mW 1,0 pkts/s Device Network interface: wlo1 (iwlwifi)
57.3 mW 17,8 ms/s 54,1 Process /usr/bin/gnome-shell

(by the way, how do I format code? I just searched until my eyes fell out for some help on how to do formatting and style in this forum...)

I've read about TLP, but it seems to be quite a fuss to install this, if it's just this single device I want to shut down... I mean, isn't there some config file, etc., that I can adjust for that? The rest seems okay for me, with the other power savings I've tried so far...
I don't mind, if it's 5-6 hours, instead of 7, but 4 hours for an Ultrabook seems pretty low... (I've read some other thread where some guy got his Thinkpad down to 5-6W per hour, so it must be possible to squeeze some more Watts out...)

jasonwryan · 2013-11-18 23:37:49

pete83 wrote:

(by the way, how do I format code? I just searched until my eyes fell out for some help on how to do formatting and style in this forum...)

Click the BBCode link right below the text box you are editing in...

pete83 · 2013-11-18 23:37:54

Hmm, nevermind, I've just deactivated the LAN device, and even though powertop doesn't show anything about it anymore, that discharge rate is still the same, around 12W :-(
That sucks, maybe I will try TLP or powerdown and see, if this helps...

pete83 · 2013-11-18 23:40:16

Thanks for the formatting tip Guess my brain didn't associate BBCode with ... anything

Last edited by pete83 (2013-11-18 23:41:03)

linrunner · 2013-11-23 13:07:33

Hi,

you should better ignore the Power est. column, these "estimations" are terribly wrong and misleading. Apart from that powertop is a fine analysis tool, but the output always needs interpretation and some knowledge to do so.

I would also advise not to try every single tweak you can find in the www. Use one of the established tools listed in the wiki and customize the settings to you needs.

I recommend TLP (of course ).

Last edited by linrunner (2013-11-23 13:08:24)

Arch Linux

#1 2013-11-17 11:28:01

Battery drain problem on HP Folio 9470m

#2 2013-11-17 12:21:11

Re: Battery drain problem on HP Folio 9470m

#3 2013-11-18 23:20:37

Re: Battery drain problem on HP Folio 9470m

#4 2013-11-18 23:37:49

Re: Battery drain problem on HP Folio 9470m

#5 2013-11-18 23:37:54

Re: Battery drain problem on HP Folio 9470m

#6 2013-11-18 23:40:16

Re: Battery drain problem on HP Folio 9470m

#7 2013-11-23 13:07:33

Re: Battery drain problem on HP Folio 9470m

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