Optimizing power drain
Posted: 11 Nov 2009, 19:39
I was playing with Karmic to see how low I could get the power drain using "normal" operations in order to try to get as much battery life as WinXP. I am using the scripts from the PPA (they sure are nice )
It seems that it's getting pretty close, but there are some things that concern me.
Even with the webcam and bluetooth turned off, powertop is still saying they are active. I know powertop has some bug related to USB autosuspend (from what I gathered, it seems it doesn't read those value correctly). So, I was using the Gnome power managers data (right click on the battery icon and do power history). It collects similar information to powertop, just without the suggestion.
Here are the questions:
1) the scripts just deactivate the driver for the bluetooth/webcam. Does this also power down the device, or are we relying on the kernel to do that for us?
2) same question for the wifi - even after disabling the wifi, there is still 6 wake-ups per second from the uhci modile with the test "usb5, i915, ath", which I'm assuming is the wifi module. If we turned it off, shouldn't that go down to zero? It seems that the chip is still powered up and not transmitting.
3) I'm using blueman instead of the built-in bluetooth manager because it's WAY better. This also allows you to turn off the bluetooth device from the program, but I'm not sure what it actually does. I do know that the scripts don't sync with it. If I disable from the program, "nc10 bluetooth status" still returns enabled. Basically, it allows some wackiness in mismatched states between the two programs. Is there any way to sync the two programs? Is one disabling better/more completely than the other?
It seems that it's getting pretty close, but there are some things that concern me.
Even with the webcam and bluetooth turned off, powertop is still saying they are active. I know powertop has some bug related to USB autosuspend (from what I gathered, it seems it doesn't read those value correctly). So, I was using the Gnome power managers data (right click on the battery icon and do power history). It collects similar information to powertop, just without the suggestion.
Here are the questions:
1) the scripts just deactivate the driver for the bluetooth/webcam. Does this also power down the device, or are we relying on the kernel to do that for us?
2) same question for the wifi - even after disabling the wifi, there is still 6 wake-ups per second from the uhci modile with the test "usb5, i915, ath", which I'm assuming is the wifi module. If we turned it off, shouldn't that go down to zero? It seems that the chip is still powered up and not transmitting.
3) I'm using blueman instead of the built-in bluetooth manager because it's WAY better. This also allows you to turn off the bluetooth device from the program, but I'm not sure what it actually does. I do know that the scripts don't sync with it. If I disable from the program, "nc10 bluetooth status" still returns enabled. Basically, it allows some wackiness in mismatched states between the two programs. Is there any way to sync the two programs? Is one disabling better/more completely than the other?