Arch Linux

CifDis

Member

Registered: 2015-12-14

Posts: 5

Asus n551jx - Huge battery drain.

Hi all,

I installed Arch Linux on my laptop last week and everything works fine excepts for the battery. I have really poor performance with my battery and I am not able to understand why.
On Arch Linux my battery last 2-3 hours maximum and on Ubuntu 14.04 my battery last 5 hrs with no problem.
I installed tlp and configured it out but nothing changed. Then I removed it and installed laptop-mode-tools and configure it but the problem persisted. I configured powertop too but it did not solve the problem too.

I thought the main problem was about graphics driver so I re-installed it from scratch using intel video driver but the battery performances were the same. So I tried nvidia drivers, but when I install them, I am not able to run x-server anymore.

After some searches I installed Manjaro and my battery problems were gone. On Manjaro I have the same battery performances I have on Ubuntu. Manjaro installed intel graphics driver with nouveau and bumblebee. On Manjaro I have good battery performance without tlp or other power tools.

I tried to re-install arch using again intel driver but I got the same battery performance. I tried also lts-kernel that is running on Manjaro but nothing changed.

I installed also Antergos but it has the same battery performance. Even Fedora 23 has the same problem.

Some stats from power top:
-Arch Linux powerusage medium 18~21W, 18W on idle, 24 to 32 on high usage.
-Manjaro and Ubuntu powerusage medium 12~15 on idle and 18 to 24W, 25W on high usage.

Desktop environment used: Gnome-shell on Arch and Manjaro, Unity on Ubuntu.

My laptop configuration:
-CPU: Intel I7-4720HQ
-GPU: Intel HD 4600 integrated and NVIDIA GTX 950M
-RAM: DDR3 1600

Sorry for the long post and thank you all in advance.

Last edited by CifDis (2015-12-15 00:07:55)

severach

Member

Registered: 2015-05-23

Posts: 198

Re: Asus n551jx - Huge battery drain.

You could install the Manjaro kernel in Arch. This can take some trickery to make this work.

Rather than overwrite the Arch boot files, I added a menu entry into Syslinux with the Manjaro initrd and vmlinuz.

The nVidia driver wouldn't run. I installed nouveau. I could have probably installed Manjaro's video driver.

Cinnamon crashed with nouveau. Ctrl-Alt-F2 helps recover from the crash. XFCE runs fine.

I boot to a text prompt and startx or startxfce4. That makes it easy to fix the system when the GUI won't function.

uname -a
Linux ?? 4.2.6-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Nov 10 22:55:03 UTC 2015 x86_64 GNU/Linux

CifDis

Member

Registered: 2015-12-14

Posts: 5

Re: Asus n551jx - Huge battery drain.

Thank you for the answer.
I can do it but it does not make real sense to me. I would like just to understand what is causing this problem and even if Manjaro's kernel solves it, I will not know why.

My goal is to run pure Arch Linux without battery problems.

severach

Member

Registered: 2015-05-23

Posts: 198

Re: Asus n551jx - Huge battery drain.

I don't mean to suggest you're going to run the Manjaro kernel permanently. That would lead to continuous problems. I only ran it for one night just to see to what degree it would work.

If the Manjaro kernel solves the problem then that eliminates all the thousands of installed applications. The problem is narrowed to a the kernel, and most likely the compile options. You have two working distros to compare to.

CifDis

Member

Registered: 2015-12-14

Posts: 5

Re: Asus n551jx - Huge battery drain.

I tried your solution but I was not able to boot into Arch again. I removed the kernel and re-install Arch kernel.

Anyways, is there anything else I can do?

I don't want to be forced to use Manjaro and Ubuntu has really annoyed me.

Thank you for your support.

CifDis

Member

Registered: 2015-12-14

Posts: 5

Re: Asus n551jx - Huge battery drain.

I followed this wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hy … screte_GPU and now the problem is gone.

Now I have the same battery performance of Manajro and Ubuntu.

Thank you all