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Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 4:58 am
by lukee
Hi, when I am using W7 I can get 4 - 5 hours of battery life with extended battery on my T43p. When I boot to Ubuntu 10.10, I am not able to get more than 2 - 2.5 hours of battery life altough I set Powersave profile and minimal intensity of LCD's backlight. Where could be the problem?
Re: Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 4:55 pm
by jronald
The only area I have seen Windoze excel at is battery life. uBuntu will not get the same life.
Ron
Re: Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 9:58 am
by ThinkRob
lukee wrote:Hi, when I am using W7 I can get 4 - 5 hours of battery life with extended battery on my T43p. When I boot to Ubuntu 10.10, I am not able to get more than 2 - 2.5 hours of battery life altough I set Powersave profile and minimal intensity of LCD's backlight. Where could be the problem?
My bet is that the GPU doesn't have the proper drivers installed, and as such isn't going in to power-saving mode. Did you install the restricted ATI drivers?
Other things to check/enable:
- WLAN power saving
- Bluetooth on/off
- hard disk spin-down/parking (I think Ubuntu has this preconfigured, but I can't remember)
- anything else that powertop recommends
The only area I have seen Windoze excel at is battery life. uBuntu will not get the same life.
With the exception of a few machines with an ATI GPU, that is most decidedly wrong. In fact, a number of machines can actually achieve better battery life under Linux than Windows, especially with recent kernels.
Re: Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 4:40 pm
by lukee
Hi ThinkRob. I am using an opensource ATI Radeon driver because ATI doesn't support Radeon X600 family anymore with the binary drivers. Bluetooth is off, WiFi is used gently.
Re: Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 8:57 pm
by ThinkRob
lukee wrote:Hi ThinkRob. I am using an opensource ATI Radeon driver because ATI doesn't support Radeon X600 family anymore with the binary drivers. Bluetooth is off, WiFi is used gently.
Ah yes. AMD and their wonderful driver support.
Yeah, if they dropped support for modern kernels, that might explain it. When I last ran Linux on my T43p the ATI driver still supported the GPU, and power-saving worked fine.
That said, I believe there are some power-saving features with the radeon module.
Also, have you run powertop and followed its advice?
Re: Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 5:42 pm
by i-SnipeZ
The open drivers are most likely the reason. I don't get better, but I do get equal battery life in Ubuntu compared to Windows on my machine, but, if the drivers you're using, especially for the video card, don't support power saving options, it's not a surprise your battery life is horrible.
Re: Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 10:16 pm
by ThinkRob
i-SnipeZ wrote:The open drivers are most likely the reason. I don't get better, but I do get equal battery life in Ubuntu compared to Windows on my machine, but, if the drivers you're using, especially for the video card, don't support power saving options, it's not a surprise your battery life is horrible.
FWIW, my T500 got better battery life under Linux than Windows when using the Intel GPU, and vice-versa when using the AMD one (even with AMD's proprietary Linux driver.) The difference wasn't significant either way, but it was consistent.
Re: Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:53 am
by comps
There's an ongoing development of power-saving features in the radeon/radeonhd drivers. The basic framework was added in 2.6.35, though I failed to use it with that kernel. Use 2.6.36 - or better - the latest stable/rc kernel.
See ie.
http://www.overclock.net/linux-unix/731 ... river.html - there are some useful hints for both UMS and KMS.
It won't probably be as good as the fglrx driver, but it's better than nothing.
Re: Battery life in Ubuntu
Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2011 9:00 am
by frankausmtank
comps wrote:There's an ongoing development of power-saving features in the radeon/radeonhd drivers. The basic framework was added in 2.6.35, though I failed to use it with that kernel. Use 2.6.36 - or better - the latest stable/rc kernel.
See ie.
http://www.overclock.net/linux-unix/731 ... river.html - there are some useful hints for both UMS and KMS.
It won't probably be as good as the fglrx driver, but it's better than nothing.
Now that's a nice hint, thanks. I made a desktop shortcut for
Code: Select all
beesu "echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile"
to manually trigger the low setting without going to the command line. Refresh rates on glxgears in fullscreen mode dropped from ~60 fps to ~25, so there seems to be something happening (2.6.35 here). Didn't check for an improvement in battery life yet.