Arch Linux

biskyy

Member

Registered: 2024-09-05

Posts: 7

iwlwifi: high power consumption

i have a thinkpad t14s gen 2a laptop with an intel ax200 network card.
i've been trying for mutiple days to increase the battery life of this laptop and one of the main culprits has been the iwlwifi driver. im using powertop to monitor power consumption and this is what it reports

The battery reports a discharge rate of 5.16 W
The energy consumed was 104 J
The estimated remaining time is 5 hours, 4 minutes

Summary: 2172.7 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 26.4% CPU use

Power est.              Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
  2.37 W     20.4%                      Device         Display backlight
  1.10 W      0.9 pkts/s                Device         Network interface: wlp3s0 (iwlwifi)
  882 mW      9.8 ms/s     725.8        Timer          tick_nohz_handler
  424 mW     30.2 ms/s     349.2        Process        [PID 960] Hyprland
  226 mW     34.4 ms/s     185.7        Process        [PID 2845] zen
  136 mW      3.4 ms/s     112.1        Process        [PID 602] [irq/100-SYNA000]
  128 mW      5.8 ms/s     105.1        Interrupt      [7] sched(softirq)
 96.3 mW      4.0 ms/s      79.2        Interrupt      [89] amdgpu

this is is my /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf file:

options iwlwifi power_save=1 power_level=5 uapsd_disable=0
options iwlmvm power_scheme=3

the behavior i've noticed is that it usually starts at around 300mW and slowly ramps up to double or triple of that(while being idle), which sucks.
i've also tried changind NetworkManager's backend to iwd but that didnt help at all so i reverted the settings.

sudo dmesg | grep iwlwifi doesnt show any errors: https://pastebin.com/dwku4nsX
im on linux-zen 6.11.6 if it matters.

googling only led me to adding uapsd_disable=0 to my iwlwifi.conf file and not much else.

Last edited by biskyy (2024-11-05 11:17:49)