Ubuntu excessive power consumption

Hi,

Decided to switch from W7HP to Ubuntu 10 Desktop version.

Everything was going great until I pulled the power cord and saw the estimated battery life.

On W7HP at idle power consumption is 4.5w
On Ubuntu at idle power consumption is 6.5w

On W7HP under 25% load power consumption is 7.5w
On Ubuntu under 25% load power consumption is 10w

I installed power top and disabled everything possible but this made little difference.

Any ideas anyone ?

 

It seems like your CPU is running full throttle. I'm a Linux noob and i'm running Mint 9. In Mint 9 you can adjust CPU Freq. Scaling Monitor. There you can set to "conservative, on demand, performance or powersave". You can also select the CPU freq if you want.

What videocard do you have? If it's an Nvidia, check your powermizer settings. Any of these can increase power consumption.

Also run system monitor. It'll tell you what the load is on each core percentage wise.

 

I have both cores set to "conservative", and tried forcing 1.2ghz mode thats the minimum.

process is CULV 1.3 SU4100 with intel GMA 4500 graphics.

 

Look at the powertop output. When the system is idle, does the processor clock down properly and spend most of its time in one of the low power modes (C2/C3)? If not you may need to play with some kernel options to make it behave.

If you have non-IGP graphics, you should investigate what kind of power management your GPU has and if it's enabled/working properly.

 

CPU is spending 88% of the time at C4.

Assume this is good.

 

Are you using a meter at the mains power with the battery out (or fully charged) for your measurements?

The max TDP of your CPU is 10W and the TDP of the chipset (GS45?) is 8/12W low/high (page 97, section 10.1).

2 to 2.5 W is a lot for a CULV, if they have near-identical loads between operating systems. Obviously this assumes you have the dead obvious stuff like having wifi (check wifi power saving mode)/bluetooth/hard disk power management settings identically set.

There are a lot of variables, and the more details you post, the more likely it is someone will have some half-decent advice.

Like the make and model of your notebook, for instance...

I assume you're talking about the 1810TZ. There is a ---> Linux thread here <--- In the first post there's even a script designed for power saving.

The most obvious thing for power consumption is which CPU governor you use, with On-Demand being the most common choice, or Powersave if you're trying to clock it all the way down, but it sounds like you already know that. If you're not compiling your own kernel or using one tailored for newer Intels, you may be missing optimizations that get included if you use the CONFIG_MCORE2.

You could give the Netbook Edition of Ubuntu a try since it has some optimizations out of the box. But you can probably tweak your desktop edition just as well with modest effort.

 

Hi,

I am using the notebook with battery in and power removed. All tests carried out with wifi/bluetooth/lan off. Volume off, screen minimum, fresh reboot. Same files/software running.

2.5w is major on 10w consumption, it takes my 6 hour battery down to around 4.5 hours.

Going to try a different linux distribution later in case its unique to ubuntu 10.

I did try the script from PatrickVogeli which was how I got it down to 10w while watching a video, before the script it was 11.5 average.

Thanks.

 

You might want to post in that thread to see if anyone has any recommendations for that machine. I didn't read through the whole thing so I'm not sure... also I don't run Ubuntu on my machines so I can't give you any good advice for tweaking the stock configuration.

There are some good wiki articles on the Ubuntu community site that you might want to check out. Linked from the main power management entry is this whiteboard which mentions SATA link power management, not sure if that made it into the default configuration or not.

If you haven't already check out LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux

Edit: Just realized from reading the thread I linked above that there's apparently some potential issue with the fan running too fast... not sure if you're getting that, but it would eat power, and the more you post about your problem, the better your chances of getting good help.

Edit 2: Also video is not a good benchmark for power usage with Intel GMA, since there is no hardware decoding going on in Linux... it is CPU-bound.