I think he was asking about USB-A specifically, which is a question I had as well. Early on, I saw reports that both USB-C and USB-A expansion cards were unpowered pass-throughs, but people now seem to treat USB-A as another power draw. Has someone confirmed that? In the early days of USB-C, I was under the impression that going from A to C was a passive adapter, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some active forms out there too.
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I believe the consensus on the forum is that USB-A modules are active and do draw power, even when they probably shouldn’t (i.e connected but not in use).
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that’s a shame, hope that is fixable; perhaps a v2 USB-A port might be in order if it can’t be fixed in software. might end up getting 4 USB-C now! personally I feel like the customizable ports are for the most part a gimmick, or at least the priority should have been greater battery life. the tradeoff of more used space and power being needed for many of the modules doesn’t seem worth it to me. but I’m biased because I’m one of the people who would want a pretty standard port selection, I don’t mind a dongle for something like ethernet.
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The Linux kernel has seen an improvement in batterylife for alder lake with 5.19 as well (for the cost of performance though)
For reference, these tests were made with 5.18 (iirc):
It is not a framework, but benchmarks for 12th gen are pretty scarce for now…
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I’ll take that! I think CPU performance is massively overhyped for day to day usage (don’t get me wrong, I could benefit from faster CPU as I compile rust btw. but the difference won’t be massive) but battery life is still such a big bottleneck on mobile devices.
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The usb-a module is just a pass-through, no active components.
There are a few caps and a resistor, none of which draw anything.
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Ah! This is the kind of info I was looking for. Yes, from those photos I would be amazed if USB-A modules were hurting battery life.
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Very interesting. I think the person on this thread are refering to the “1,5Watt/hour” that has been measured using modules.
Now it seems that USB A & C are not the culpride.
This would let us just unplug the HDMI when not in use… maybe we can deactivate it from software in linux then.
Thks SImon,
That s very good news, ~ 5% less speed (20% in IA) , but 20% less power drawned for the same taks. That s exactelly what I was expecting from “efficient” cores.
That s really cool, especially thinking those are crunching number benchmarks. WHere the CPU actually as very little time to get idle!
This possibly means that the battery life could be extanded more than 20% CPU wise. Looking forward to a “battery test” with this new kernel (browsing the web and videos).
Those 20% would mean we could get back the 1H battery life, we had with 11th gen, while having better performances.
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Awesome! Do we know if the DisplayPort extension is passive or not?
Yeah this is very promising. In general is it considered a bad idea to upgrade to a new kernel without support from the distribution? This seems like such an uplift that waiting for the distro to update to it seems painful. I think fedora 37 which isn’t even out yet will be based on kernel 5.18, I’m not sure how quickly Pop!_OS tends to update its kernel. I suppose this is a situation where running Arch pays dividends.
Upgrading kernels is totally fine and a great thing to learn how to do. I’m sure there’s a PPA which has the latest kernels but it may be worth learning to compile your own. You can always have multiple kernels as long as your EFI/boot partition is big enough so you can switch back and forth (I like to have a mainline kernel available). The Arch and Gentoo wikis are a decent reference for boot loader and kernel stuff.
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That’s good to know, thanks!
Depends on what you are doing with your system. It going to be my main rigg. So I am not planning on testing kernels. Anyhow you will be able to boot with one or the other kernel via GRUB. SO you can always fall back to a working kernel.
I personnaly would better go for next Ubuntu 22.10 in October. Even thought this would put me in the non LTS wagon until 2024 !
Found also this for evaluation , just copy the iso on a USB key and off you go to test the new kernel 
https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-canary/current/
I am on Mate currentely, “for a restrospective future” !!! <3 , the daily is there: Ubuntu MATE 24.04 (Noble Numbat) Daily Build
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Thanks
I probably won’t run Ubuntu on my framework, I don’t like the direction it’s headed with snaps and I think it’s not as interesting as what System76 are doing with Pop!_OS or what you can get with more up to date stock Gnome on Fedora. I’m saying this as an Ubuntu 20.04 user on my current laptop.
Plugging in one USB A module on the 11th gen board.
This is the drain adding a type A and then HDMI.
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This is so interesting, have any people on the framework team addressed this as far as you know?
It not so much the USB A but clearly it has to be recognised as being not the deafult USB C so it will ‘cause’ if not ‘draw’ power.
However why that is over 1W rather than 0.001W is the issue as far as I can see.
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Not that I am aware. Quite a lot of folk have noticed anything not type C drains additional power at least on 11th gen.
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But if nothing is plugged into the USB-A then does it really need to be recognised at all by the computer?
The problem with USB-A has been mentioned before:
I recall reading elsewhere that the problem is not that the USB-A card itself is active, but that it makes a connection between some pins on the port, showing that a device is “plugged in”, where the USB-C protocol then requires some polling on the laptop side to see if the device has any requests.
This electronic activity does seem to persist when the laptop is s2idle or deep suspended, when (percentage-wise) it starts to be quite significant. I haven’t spotted a follow-up from @Kieran_Levin on whether they’ve been able to find possible mitigations in firmware. For now: get 4x USB-C; plus any expansion cards you’d like. If you’re in a situation where you want to maximize battery, you can use the cards as dongles (and they’re competitively priced for that). I wish I’d known when I ordered.
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