[SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

mcloaked · 2014-04-22 14:24:34

I have had a Lenovo S540 Thinkpad for a few months and was puzzled by the battery draining when it was left shut down completely for a few days. The expectation was that even after a week there should be no appreciable battery drain.

By chance I came across an arch wiki page on Wake on LAN at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wo … ng_problem

On checking the BIOS settings I found WOL was set "on AC only" - so I changed it to disabled.

On rebooting I found that Linux still thought that it was enabled!

# cat /sys/class/net/enp3s0/device/power/wakeup                                                
enabled
# ethtool enp3s0 | grep Wake-on
        Supports Wake-on: pumbg
        Wake-on: g

So despite WOL being off in the BIOS it seems it is still set on in arch! I don't know if this indicates that the BIOS is buggy (I have the current latest BIOS)!

However reading wiki pages further it is possible to set up a udev rule to disable WOL for the network interface so I now have a udev file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-disable_wol.rules

# cat 70-disable_wol.rules
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="net", KERNEL=="eth*", RUN+="/usr/bin/ethtool -s %k wol d"

After rebooting it now seems that wol for the ethernet NIC is indeed disabled now so there should not be any power going to the NIC after shutdown.

# ethtool enp3s0 | grep Wake-on
        Supports Wake-on: pumbg
        Wake-on: d
# cat /sys/class/net/enp3s0/device/power/wakeup                                                  
disabled

Does anyone know if this is definitely due to a BIOS bug in the Thinkpad series BIOS firmware?

Does anyone else have a similar problem with the same laptop or a different one, and if so what is the best solution?

With the workaround I have above I will now have to leave the machine shut down for a few days and see if the battery drain issue is now fixed or not. Either way I cannot imagine why it would be necessary to have WOL set to enabled for a laptop.

Last edited by mcloaked (2014-05-03 20:56:14)

WonderWoofy · 2014-04-22 16:01:31

WoL should not be usable if it is disabled in the BIOS. So I would have to guess that this is probably a firmware bug. Though I just checked, and I have my WoL set to be disabled in the BIOS as well, and it reports:

	Supports Wake-on: pumbg
	Wake-on: pumbg

So I don't know... maybe the driver itself is just wonky (mine runs off the r8169 module).

Most Thinkpads also have the ability to charge a USB device while the machine is off as well. This can be turned on and off from the BIOS. I actually noticed that if I left it on the battery drain while sleeping increased dramatically, and would also assume that the drain would remain present if I actually turned my machine fully off as well.

In any case, I hope you're enjoying your new machine. I've been eyeing the new Thinkpads, but can't bring myself to fork over the money. The improved battery life with those Haswell processors is oh so tempting though!

mcloaked · 2014-04-22 17:14:00

Yes my laptop has a BIOS setting for the "always on USB" which on mine is turned off so I presume that it is only powered when the laptop is running.

The WOL setting does look to me like a firmware bug as you say - but I have now turned off the machine and I will leave it a couple of days. Previously the battery would be down to around 70% after several days so I will see what the level is when I next turn it back on. I guess that there are fancy ethernet testers that could check if there is power in the socket but I don't possess such test equipment - though I wonder if other users may already have been down this route before?

Yes overall I like the S540 - I was kind of forced into it as I needed to have Windows to doing tasks like run map updates on satnav, and also to update a BT headset which did not have any linux way to do it (apart from Windows in a VM, or wine). My previous machine was Windows XP, and my previous VM was XP also, so I had to bite the bullet and move forward! I was initially bitterly disappointed with it because it was Window 8 and not 8.1, so I had to update it to 8,1 to make its behaviour vaguely sensible, but the clickpad driver was pretty out of date and I had to get up to date drivers from the clickpad manufacturer site, as no up to date drivers were available from the Lenovo site. Similarly there were old graphics drivers and again I had to go to the graphics manufacturer site for up to date drivers for those. Additionally there are a number of small irritations, such as the keyboard backlight which comes on briefly during boot and then goes off when the system is booted, both on Windows and linux (it's dual boot). So I will need to find out how to switch the LEDs to the medium brightness setting during the boot process. The wireless card was also not as fast as I had hoped and is Wireless-N 7260 instead of what I had presumed would be Wireless-AC 7260 so I can't use 802.11AC which I had hoped would be my first foray into very fast wifi. Getting it set up with dual boot UEFI using refind took a little research and thinking about, but it does generally work well. I did get hit by the efistub black screen kernel issue which luckily I could work around using the gnu-efi build of refind. That has only hit me with one of the kernels so far so I have to be aware it could happen again.

Other than that it is nice, lightweight, and with an i7 processor is snappy. Hybrid graphics remains unusable so I can only use integrated Intel graphics at this point. Hopefully this will be remedied as the drivers and kernel develop beyond 3.15.

However I should stick to the topic - and I will report back when I have completed the test on battery drain after changing the WOL settings.

To comment finally about Haswell and battery drain in general - with Thunderbird, Chrome (with 5 tabs open) and a terminal session running with wireless connected, and some server processes such as dovecot for internal imap, I was seeing about 14Watts consumption in powertop, with an estimated 4.5 hours of running time with the screen on max brightness (after changing the WOL settings). Much better than I have had with previous machines.

Last edited by mcloaked (2014-04-22 17:20:46)

WonderWoofy · 2014-04-22 17:20:37

mcloaked wrote:

To comment finally about Haswell and battery drain in general - with Thunderbird, Chrome (with 5 tabs open) and a terminal session running with wireless connected I was seeing about 14Watts consumption in powertop, with an estimated 4.5 hours of running time with the screen on max brightness (after changing the WOL settings). Much better than I have had with previous machines.

That seems a little high actually. I wonder if you have gone through and adjusted all the stuff that powertop recommends?

Inxsible · 2014-04-22 17:23:38

mcloaked wrote:

You are right - I have not yet been through the powertop suggested amendments! That will be another task when I have everything else working optimally first!

mcloaked, there is a difference between Quote and Report !!

mcloaked · 2014-04-22 17:25:36

WonderWoofy wrote:

mcloaked wrote:
To comment finally about Haswell and battery drain in general - with Thunderbird, Chrome (with 5 tabs open) and a terminal session running with wireless connected I was seeing about 14Watts consumption in powertop, with an estimated 4.5 hours of running time with the screen on max brightness (after changing the WOL settings). Much better than I have had with previous machines.
That seems a little high actually. I wonder if you have gone through and adjusted all the stuff that powertop recommends?

You are right - I have not made any recommended adjustments from powertop yet - I still have other fine tuning to do on it first!

mcloaked · 2014-04-22 17:27:05

Inxsible wrote:

mcloaked wrote:
You are right - I have not yet been through the powertop suggested amendments! That will be another task when I have everything else working optimally first!
mcloaked, there is a difference between Quote and Report !!

Thank you - I realised the second I clicked the wrong button - and my sincere apologies. Is there any way to undo that or does it go straight to the moderator?

Inxsible · 2014-04-22 17:31:27

straight to moderator !

mcloaked · 2014-04-22 17:32:29

Inxsible wrote:

straight to moderator !

I'm embarrassed by my error. I'm sorry.

mcloaked · 2014-04-25 09:24:16

I have now tested my laptop after having left it for two and a half days shut down completely having made sure that the battery was at 100% charge when I shut it down. Booting up today the battery was still at 100% instead of the more typical 70% after that time, so it seems that the workaround for WOL being enabled as detailed in the earlier posts has completely resolved this issue. So it does indeed seem that despite the network interface being set WOL disabled in the BIOS there was still power going to the NIC when the machine was shut down. So this looks like a Thinkpad BIOS bug, at least on this S540. I don't know if this problem is just on this series of machines or if it is more widespread?

Anyway I will mark this thread as closed and solved though I will raise a bug report direct with Lenovo and maybe in time an updated BIOS will be released which has this BIOS bug fixed.

x33a · 2014-04-25 17:35:15

mcloaked wrote:

Inxsible wrote:
mcloaked, there is a difference between Quote and Report !!
Thank you - I realised the second I clicked the wrong button - and my sincere apologies. Is there any way to undo that or does it go straight to the moderator?

Hmm, now that I noticed it, the two buttons are very close to each other. Hell, they even rhyme

Mods, do you encounter many accidental reportings? If that's the case, maybe we should request the fluxbb devs to move the links away from each other.

mcloaked · 2014-05-02 07:23:34

Here is an interim update. I contacted Lenovo tech support, who then asked me to supply details of the problem, which I did including the workaround and tests I conducted, and in my reply I suggested that Lenovo engineers could run their own tests on their hardware in their laboratories. Lenovo tech support have passed on my report to their engineers so hopefully in due course a fixed BIOS will be released for the Thinkpad S540 at least. I guess that anybody with the corresponding issue on different hardware should contact Lenovo tech support with their own details and ask them to pass it on to Lenovo engineers for a fix.

The issue of battery drain when shut down is much more serious than a mere irritation, since it will significantly shorten the life of the battery which has a limited number of discharge/recharge cycles governing its overall life. In the case of the Thinkpad S540, and some other Lenovo laptops, changing the battery is not trivial since it is internal and requires disassembly of the laptop to access the battery. It also means the user will incur real cost to replace the battery much sooner than expected in the service life of the laptop.

I have also, since finding this problem, discovered that it is not limited to Lenovo Thinkpads, and I have seen postings elsewhere with the same problem both in Linux and in Windows for HP, Toshiba and Sony Vaio laptops. So it is a much more widespread problem than I thought.

I will report back when I get a response from Lenovo indicating some progress.

Edit 2014 December 30: Lenovo never replied to me!

Last edited by mcloaked (2014-12-30 18:23:10)

Arch Linux

#1 2014-04-22 14:24:34

[SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#2 2014-04-22 16:01:31

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#3 2014-04-22 17:14:00

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#4 2014-04-22 17:20:37

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#5 2014-04-22 17:23:38

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#6 2014-04-22 17:25:36

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#7 2014-04-22 17:27:05

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#8 2014-04-22 17:31:27

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#9 2014-04-22 17:32:29

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#10 2014-04-25 09:24:16

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#11 2014-04-25 17:35:15

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

#12 2014-05-02 07:23:34

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad battery drain when shut down

Board footer