T60 power managment

Machine: 14,1" T60 with Intel graphics
Distro: debian testing + custom kernel
Status: ACPI works, CPU frequency scaling works, wifi works, suspend sort of works, 3D will work as soon as debian fixes a certain package.

Major problem: Battery is drained much (~1,5x-2x) faster under Linux than on Windows, even though the CPU is set to minimum speed and the screen is fully dimmed. The sound card (or something near it) also emits a peculiar high-pitched noise whenever the CPU (or GPU?) is idle in Linux and the power adapter is disconnected. Has anyone else noticed this or found the cause?


btw. ThinkWiki ftw!

 

I had a T31p that'd do the "high pitched whining" think whenever the power adapter was connected, but that was because the notebook's power supply was going south I think. Work machine, so I didn't dig into it.
You are using the p-states rather than CPU throttling, right? And does it do the same thing in windows? Have you tried another distro, like an ubuntu or fedora livecd or something to see if it's Debian specific?

 

Find some information at: www.thinkwiki.org.
I suggest you to use Alsa latest source from the alsa site, do not use the kernel modules. And the newest linux kernel.

good luck

 

I just received my T60 a couple of hours ago and I'm afraid I noticed the whining noise. I was initially running on AC power under windows, and I switched to battery power while my CD drive droned out any possible whine while I created my recovery discs. I booted into an ubuntu live-cd when I first noticed the the noise which was really loud. Going back to windows, it was still there - albeit not quite as loud.

I found this post mentioning that it only occurs when running on battery, which I can verify. And I guess the thinkwiki states that the sound comes from the AC adapter, but I don't quite know what to do next. Is the machine defect? Do all T60's have this problem?

_____________
T60 (2007-72U) with ATI X1400

 

See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_high_pitch_noises

echo 2 > /sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate
That fixes the noise for me at the cost of slightly more power usage. I don't know of a solution for Windows, though, because I seldom use it.

Yes, I'd call this a defect of some sort.

Btw. for those who like to compile their own kernels, 2.6.17 with the beyond3 patchset works very well for me. Suspend2 has proven to be very reliable.

 

I played around some more and found out that I can further limit the occasions when the noise appears:
- no noise when on AC power
- no noise when wireless switch is off
- no noise when CPU/CD drive is busy
- high pitched noise with wireless switch on when idling on battery
- no noise on warm reboot on battery. However, in this case I get an error with the ethernet chip (e1000_probe: The EEPROM Checksum Is Not Valid). This error has been reported earlier at http://www.prolixium.com/linux-t60, but I also noticed that in this case the noise does not occur.

So far, I've only used the ubuntu live cd, and will try knoppix to get another shot with linux. I'm kind of reluctant starting to set this machine up, since I don't know whether I should send it in to ask for a replacement.

I forgot to mention that I updated the bios to 1.09 before I started testing linux.

 

knoppix was a disaster, although I didn't hear a sound. The reason probably being that it didn't recognize the wifi card. And qtparted didn't see my sata disk either ... . Except for the screen resolution, the live ubuntu worked out of the box ...

 

I fixed the e1000 problem by commenting out the eeprom checksum check in the kernel as explained in http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_e1000:_EEPROM_Checksum_Is_Not_Valid

It's no great surprise that most distros don't like the wifi card since it uses a partly closed-source driver.

 

lagitus, max_cstate fixed the noise problem. I haven't tried the e1000 fix yet. Thanks a bunch for your help!
Other than that, do you know how wide-spread this problem is? I'm still thinking of probably trying to get the machine replaced and hope that the new one doesn't have the same issue ... I don't need the T60 that urgently - I'm really happy with the design and everything, but the noise issue really bugs me.

 

I have no idea how widespread the noise problem is but the more people bug Lenovo about it the better I think

 

I just found another work-around for the e1000 problem
Simply kicking out the module and reloading it fixes the problem:
# modprobe -r e1000
# modprobe e1000
Still a work-around, but it works