Bugzilla – Bug 1187195
tumbleweed battery drain
Last modified: 2023-01-10 08:37:26 UTC
pulsaudio consumes half of total power needed by system powertow run on dell xps17 shows 17W drain of pulsaudio. If input is set to capture mode (enough to enable mic capture in alsamixer) pulsaudio then consumes even double of that. For reference the whole Fedora 34 desktop consumes about 6W on the same machine !
Try to switch to pipewire. Does it work better in this regard? And, if it's confirmed, you'd better report to the upstream Issue tracker. It's a generic problem, as TW basically follows upstream; the only patches we have so far are some upstream backports for BT headset support.
no sound in pipewire after following https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Pipewire no soundcards detected interestingly after returning back to pulseaudio it's not using that much power still powerconsumption is huge in opensuse tumbleweed on XPS 9700 battery times: - Opensuse tumbleweed runs 1:30 - Fedora 34 runs almost 10 hours - Ubuntu runs almost 10 hours the difference is devastating
PowerTOP 2.14 Overview Idle stats Frequency stats Device stats Tunables WakeUp The battery reports a discharge rate of 39.5 W The energy consumed was 802 J The estimated remaining time is 1 hours, 26 minutes Summary: 2903,7 wakeups/second, 0,0 GPU ops/seconds, 0,0 VFS ops/sec and 31,4% CPU use Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description 17.3 W 19,9 pkts/s Device Network interface: wlp0s20f3 (iwlwifi) 6.11 W 5,1% Device Display backlight 176 mW 4,5 ms/s 544,1 Timer tick_sched_timer 146 mW 11,7 ms/s 451,8 Process [PID 2190] /usr/bin/Xorg.bin -nolisten tcp - 84.8 mW 90,4 ms/s 261,8 Process [PID 3122] /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox 51.5 mW 667,7 µs/s 159,1 Interrupt [17] idma64.1 44.6 mW 15,7 ms/s 137,6 Process [PID 2389] /usr/bin/kwin_x11 41.0 mW 39,9 ms/s 126,5 Process [PID 3239] /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox -conte 34.4 mW 3,9 ms/s 106,1 Process [PID 2390] /usr/bin/kwin_x11 30.6 mW 1,6 ms/s 94,5 Timer hrtimer_wakeup 26.2 mW 3,9 ms/s 81,0 Process [PID 3140] /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox 24.3 mW 2,6 ms/s 75,0 Process [PID 2738] /usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=n 17.9 mW 4,3 ms/s 55,2 Interrupt [0] HI_SOFTIRQ 17.1 mW 1,0 ms/s 52,8 Process [PID 963] [irq/27-DELL098F] 13.7 mW 1,6 ms/s 42,3 kWork engine_retire
It sounds more like some device being used (e.g. the discrete GPU) without power-saving. Is it with a Nvidia GPU? Please give hwinfo output and the full dmesg output. The powertop outputs shows the WiFi being the most consumption. What if you disable the WiFi temporarily? (e.g. via rfkill). powertop isn't always the accurate output, so you cannot trust the result. Also, if you run powertop --auto once, does the result change?
it is not nvidia as due to another bug I filled since last zypper DUP my GPU does not work in tumbleweeed :) I see that rfkill helps so wlan is the one to blame which is strange as I sit 2 meters from my hotspot and I'm not transferring anything more than this bugzilla page.
Actually, a system without a GPU driver *might* consume higher power because it keeps the chip active without runtime PM. And nouveau as fallback doesn't work always well. But you confirmed that it's WiFi, and this can be easier to handle, I assume. Could you check whether the similar behavior is seen on the older TW kernels (without Nvidia graphics)? You can find the old kernel packages in my OBS repos, e.g. home:tiwai:kernel:5.11, home:tiwai:kernel:5.11, etc. http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/tiwai:/kernel:/5.11/standard/ It'd be helpful if you can figure out whether a kernel regression or not (and which kernel starts showing the bad performance).
Hi I tested 5.11 kernel it seems like the results are fairly similar. I think powertop result is not that reliable as it shows now 10W total while it estimates iwlwifi to be 17,5W Still i was distrohoping between Fedora34 and Ubuntu 20.04 to find out ahat after returning to Tumbleweed batterylife magically improved. I no longer get a burning lap from my xps 17 laptop. Even on standard kernel. I'm marking the bug as resolved for now and reopen when more data is available.
Original problem with pulsaudio being the source of powerdrain disapeared after removing pulseaudio , switching to pipewire and returning to pulseaudio. now the major consumption comes from wifi driver iwlwifi and backlight
I have done more testing Fedora 34 power consumption is going as low as low as 3.14 W/h with the same scenario (cpu idle - below 1%, no gpu, almost idle desktop) opensuse tumbleweed hits 17 W/h on average. Ubuntu 20.04 also gets close to Fedore 34 You can say powertop is inaccurate but I can really feel the difference in laptop heat. The battery reports a discharge rate of 17.3 W The energy consumed was 329 J The estimated remaining time is 3 hours, 50 minutes Summary: 3145,5 wakeups/second, 0,0 GPU ops/seconds, 0,0 VFS ops/sec and 70,3% CPU use Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description 11.5 W 5,1% Device Display backlight 5.85 W 58,5 pkts/s Device Network interface: wlp0s20f3 (iwlwifi) I can understand it can vary between OSes but this is huge difference on work hours in the end I get almost several times more on other Linuxes in comparison to OpenSuse. I tried home:tiwai:kernel:5.11 but not much improvement if any
The best way to compare would be to install Fedora kernel somehow onto the openSUSE TW system and check whether it shows the similar problem or not. If Fedora kernel works better, it's likely some difference of kernel configuration that matters, and we need to compare.
And, if it's about the iwlwifi, it might be worth to try to change the firmware files. The firmware files are found in linux-firmware git repository, and you can take the older versions from there, too.
(In reply to Takashi Iwai from comment #11) > And, if it's about the iwlwifi, it might be worth to try to change the > firmware files. The firmware files are found in linux-firmware git > repository, and you can take the older versions from there, too. I tried that - no help I made some other observations - I think the total power consumption is just much higher and somehow powertop tries to find a a victim to blame. SOmetimes it says it's because of display backlight even if I put it to 5% brightness. Even more WHen I plugged an usb dock/hub with ethernet and usb keyboard it started to report several Wats ! on keyboard . In other case on usb drive in other case on ethernet adapter.
here's the evidence I switched wifi off and unloaded it's module iwlwifi and now ethernet shows high Wats I switched internal display totally and dispaly backlight still shows high Wats ower est. Usage Events/s Category Description 15.9 W 0,0% Device Display backlight 11.0 W 15,9 pkts/s Device Network interface: enp0s20f0u2u1i5 (cdc_ncm) 833 mW 6,6 ms/s 694,0 Timer tick_sched_timer 385 mW 30,4 ms/s 320,8 Process [PID 1937] /usr/bin/Xorg.bin -nolisten tcp -auth /run/sddm/{92cb42bd-59ed-4f40-8df3-0c837fb32379} -background none -noreset -di 170 mW 23,4 ms/s 141,3 Process [PID 2145] /usr/bin/kwin_x11 151 mW 52,4 ms/s 126,1 Process [PID 2641] /usr/bin/konsole
Yes, powertop output seems somehow screwed up. Not sure whether it's a bug in powertop or some inconsistency in kernel ABI via sysfs, but the result doesn't look reliable, in anyway. We'd still like to fix any real issue; it'd be helpful if you can test other kernel (e.g. from Fedroa) on top of the TW system and see whether it really saves the power. Once confirmed, we may confirm the difference of kernel configs that may matter.
no idea how to test fedora kernel in suse
i tried OpenSuse kernel 5.4 usage on idle was arround 12-17 Wats , a bit less than current but still 200%-500% worse than Ubuntu20.04-Fedora34
Seems to be resolved with current tumbleweed