F15 Power Management

[twohot]

I've been running F15 for 2weeks++ and I find that it runs out of battery power much faster than when I am logged into Windows-Vista. My laptop is able to run 3hrs+ on Windows but at 1.5hrs in F15 I am receiving warning alerts. Does this have a fix?

Similarly, the Brightness adjustment on the Display Setting is not persistent. Each time I reboot/boot-up I must set the brightness. This is exhausting

[lakerssuperman]

What type of video chip is in your laptop? What video drivers are you using?

[twohot]

I think its called Gallium (Driver), seems like a default ... The hardware is actually nVidia Quadro FX1600. I don't have propriety drivers installed yet. When I ran Gnome-shell (sand-boxed) on F14, the propriety driver had some quirky performance. I don't see that I have much choice ... gotta play serious games someday :)

[lakerssuperman]

With Fedora 15 and the RPMFusion repository you can install the 270 Nvidia driver. It works well with Gnome Shell. With the open source Nouveau driver power management is limited at this point, as is control for dynamic screen brightness adjustment. The proprietary driver also doesn't have brightness control ability.

Your battery life is always going to be a little lower in Linux as the power management isn't quite as tuned to the hardware as Windows but it should be somewhere in the ballpark. You may have better luck with the proprietary Nvidia driver.

[twohot]

With Fedora 15 and the RPMFusion repository you can install the 270 Nvidia driver. It works well with Gnome Shell. With the open source Nouveau driver power management is limited at this point, as is control for dynamic screen brightness adjustment. The proprietary driver also doesn't have brightness control ability.

Thanks for the info on Nvidia Drivers ... I think I was on the 260 series on F14. I'll try this out right away. I found the problem with the Brightness settings. Using dconf-editor, I was possible to set preferred brightness for AV and battery sessions. It kept loading the defaults before that ... now that area seems okay. I hope some effort is being made to make Power Management in Linux more 'tuned' to the Hardware like in Windows ... if I am a prolific coder, I'll be eager to contribute in that area.

Otherwise, its a strong negative for Linux. A 5% to 50% drop is a lot of drop in difference ... where power is concerned

---------- Post added at 03:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:54 AM ----------

The good news is: I got 270 Nvidia driver installed and running on my F15. No sweat.

The Sad news is: The Animated switch to 'Overview' mode is still quirky ... jerks and is not smooth like the Nouveau experience. So, I see no difference between my experience with Gnome-shell (sandboxed in F14) and the experience with same on its own -- (well except for the functioning Accounts Service etc)

Yeah ... before the installation I got 56% power with 57mins left (battery mode ... no electricity at the moment). After installation, I am getting the same 56% with 1hr .... huh?:confused:

WHAT?????

The notification is going WACKO! Now its 1h 15mins left ..... Okay .... now its 48mins left. WHAT IS GOING ON ???????????????:dis::

[marko]

Do you have all these setup?:

1) cpuspeed activated and running
2) your power profile when on battery set to powersave instead of performance

I'm using KDE4 and in it there's a nice battery plasma widget that uses powerdevil and it can manage the power profile(ie it will flip the profile to performance when it sees the AC is plugged in and back to powersave when the AC goes away and you're on battery ). I think my display brightness is persistent across boots but I'm not sure.
I have Fedora 14 here but Fedora 15 should have all this and/or more.

---------- Post added at 02:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:23 PM ----------

Do you have all these setup?:

1) cpuspeed activated and running
2) your power profile when on battery set to powersave instead of performance

I'm using KDE4 and in it there's a nice battery plasma widget that uses powerdevil and it can manage the power profile(ie it will flip the profile to performance when it sees the AC is plugged in and back to powersave when the AC goes away and you're on battery ). I think my display brightness is persistent across boots but I'm not sure.
I have Fedora 14 here but Fedora 15 should have all this and/or more.

[AdamW]

there's actually no point faffing with power management profiles on modern CPUs, as they are sufficiently good at scaling power to required performance. It's best to just leave it to the kernel, it will get it right. I think the first responder is on the button here, the major issue will be graphics power consumption as nouveau does not do much power management at present.

[Thetargos]

This issue apparently has been tracked down to a Kernel regression in 2.6.38 and 2.6.39 (according to Phoronix, at least). As with many articles over there I took this with a great grain of salt, but after being using F15 on my main lapotop for the last weeks, I can confirm without a doubt that this is indeed present in the current 2.6.38 kernel as found in Fedora 15, and apparently has nothing to do with the drivers, power settings (at kernel build time) or features being enabled (as in ACPI and APM)... But rather somewhere else is suggested. The Phoronix editor has actually gone rampage about this and obsessively testing this issue out.

Here's (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQ1Ng) the latest bit of "news" regarding this issue... There hasn't been much echo apparently, but it does appear that a few share of people are getting hit by this issue, regardless of the CPU architecture, etc.

[AdamW]

well, their claim is that this causes 25% higher consumption than before, which seems low for the difference between Windows and Linux claimed here. But we don't really have enough evidence to be sure.

[Thetargos]

The main problem being the widely different hardware combinations people use. Many components may be ACPI compliant, while others are tailored to Windows' specific features or methods, this has been an issue with Linux like for ever. Maybe this time around it simply has been made more evident, as the standards are followed more closely by the software? That and the fact that there are a lot of drivers in Linux which are power management agnostic, and some rely on a sane ACPI environment, which if the BIOS can't provide, Linux can't provide either (which seems to be the case in my Toshiba laptop).

[surfino]

12 mins without powersource and it's already 50%.. it might be a kernel problem ok, but in latest ubuntu i didnt have so much battery consumption (i have a dual core, intel gma965) , damn!

[screamin_jesus]

12 mins without powersource and it's already 50%.. it might be a kernel problem ok, but in latest ubuntu i didnt have so much battery consumption (i have a dual core, intel gma965) , damn!

My intel machine is getting excellent battery life, just as good as windows :) Intel i5 460m with integrated iron lake graphics, get around 4 hours in fedora 15.

[surfino]

ouch, time to change my battery then, seems to be the only solution :)

[tickinghd]

I've watched the temperature with lm_sensors and compared the proprietary Catalyst driver and the free radeon driver. While the radeon driver is very good actually - it runs around 10 celcius warmer than the proprietary driver even after enabling "dynpm" (http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature).

With the proprietary driver the laptop does not wake up from suspend and hibernate, and the 3D performance is way behind the Windows-drivers - so all in all there are few benefits with the proprietary drivers. On the other hand the power management is not very good in the free drivers.

Evergreen / Radeon HD 6250 / AMD C-50 APU.

[nirik]

I've watched the temperature with lm_sensors and compared the proprietary Catalyst driver and the free radeon driver. While the radeon driver is very good actually - it runs around 10 celcius warmer than the proprietary driver even after enabling "dynpm" (http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature).

With the proprietary driver the laptop does not wake up from suspend and hibernate, and the 3D performance is way behind the Windows-drivers - so all in all there are few benefits with the proprietary drivers. On the other hand the power management is not very good in the free drivers.

Evergreen / Radeon HD 6250 / AMD C-50 APU.

Try the suggestions at: http://www.overclock.net/linux-unix/731469-how-power-saving-radeon-driver.html

(for the kms side).

At least one other person who was seeing heat issues with the radeon driver had it solved by switching to auto or low as noted there.

[tickinghd]

Try the suggestions at: http://www.overclock.net/linux-unix/731469-how-power-saving-radeon-driver.html

(for the kms side).

At least one other person who was seeing heat issues with the radeon driver had it solved by switching to auto or low as noted there.

Thank you, it explained things better than my Google skills managed to gather. I recon Fedora uses KMS mode since setting xorg settings was ignored according to the logs. The strange thing is that "low" profile equal running with display in dpms off mode (according to x.org) but the temperature is only at level with the proprietary driver when the display is off, but not when display is on. It's a mystery why forcing the low profile does not make special impact in temperature. I will play around with settings and see what happens.