Resolved by: “Downgrading” from 23.10 to 22.04 Ubuntu with OEM Kernel. Sway seems to be slightly more efficient than Hypr.
Hi Folks! Per title, framework is awesome, and I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing my battery use. Somehow, my display power consumption stays high no matter what display % i have it set as.
Is this normal? And what are some places I should look to help myself out?
Self-Checklist:
- [x] Did you follow everything here for your platform? Optimizing Ubuntu Battery Life
- [x] Latest Kernel and BIOS? Ubuntu 23.10 @ Kernel: 6.5.0-21-generic.
- [x] powertop --calibrate? Check.
The battery reports a discharge rate of 10.4 W
The energy consumed was 203 J
The estimated remaining time is 3 hours, 26 minutes
Summary: 2502.9 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 64.4% CPU use
Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
8.79 W 32.5% Device Display backlight
964 mW 8.5 pkts/s Device Network interface: wlp1s0 (mt7921e)
146 mW 324.8 ms/s 41.0 kWork commit_work
...
- “Hypr/Sway?”: Sure but that shouldn’t affect the power consumption of the display backlight, and they all record roughly the same power consumption.
1 Like
Would installing amd64-ucode (the amd microcode) already be done with the kernel or maybe you could try installing it separately
1 Like
Appreciate your comment! I had the same thought a while back i think, it is at the latest version currently.
amd64-microcode is already the newest version (3.20230808.1.1ubuntu1).
amd64-microcode set to manually installed.
dmesg
[ 0.593311] microcode: CPU0: patch_level=0x0a704103
[ 0.593324] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.2.
1 Like
Given my whole laptop idles at <4W at 20% having the display alone use 9W at 30% sounds a bit unreasonable, you sure powertop isn’t just confused?
1 Like
That is really weirdly high. The datasheet from the display’s manufacturer indicates that at 100% brightness the backlight consumes a max of 2.8 W and the rest of the display’s components consume a max of 0.6 W for a total of 3.4 W (which is also listed as the max total power for the display).
1 Like
Haha I think that was quite likely. Powertop does like to be fickle sometime. But after various testing (powerstats, etc), it seems to confirm the usage. Also at near-idle with 31% brightness.
Time User Nice Sys Idle IO Run Ctxt/s IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit Watts
10:07:11 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.9 0.0 1 2019 1639 18 18 20 9.19
10:07:21 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.9 0.0 1 2022 1646 21 20 21 8.75
10:07:31 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.8 0.0 2 2077 1691 21 20 21 8.45
10:07:41 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.8 0.0 1 2051 1715 20 20 20 8.33
10:07:51 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.9 0.0 1 2150 1776 20 20 20 8.24
10:08:01 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.8 0.0 1 2017 1705 21 20 21 8.15
10:08:11 0.4 0.0 0.6 98.9 0.0 2 2021 1656 20 20 23 8.22
10:08:21 0.5 0.0 0.7 98.9 0.0 1 2015 1658 21 20 21 8.25
10:08:31 0.5 0.0 0.7 98.8 0.0 1 2081 1746 21 20 21 8.23
10:08:41 0.4 0.0 0.6 99.0 0.0 1 2139 1764 19 18 75 8.46
10:08:51 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.9 0.0 1 2168 1777 20 20 21 8.50
10:09:01 0.4 0.0 0.7 99.0 0.0 1 2066 1682 21 20 21 8.33
10:09:11 0.4 0.0 0.6 99.0 0.0 1 2045 1705 20 20 20 8.31
10:09:21 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.9 0.0 1 2051 1716 21 20 21 8.25
10:09:31 0.5 0.0 0.9 98.7 0.0 1 2050 1754 21 20 21 8.19
10:09:41 0.4 0.0 0.8 98.8 0.0 1 2037 1720 20 20 20 8.16
10:09:51 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.9 0.0 1 2054 1693 20 20 20 8.13
10:10:01 0.4 0.0 0.7 98.8 0.0 1 2043 1689 21 20 21 8.23
10:10:11 0.6 0.0 0.8 98.6 0.0 1 2777 5390 25 21 25 8.47
Even when it works well it is at best doing educated guesses, other times it is just doing wild guesses XD.
I do wonder where those 9W are going, it’s very unlikely to be the screen, how new a kernel are you running (latest can mean a lot of things) and are you running amd-pstate active or something else?
1 Like
Ubuntu 23.10 @ Kernel: 6.5.0-21-generic.
w. respect to amd-pstate, I don’t think I have changed anything in my /etc/grub yet.
So not very new then XD
Yeah I am going with your cpu isn’t powersaving right, no idea why powertop attributes that to the display but powertop being powertop I guess.
1 Like
I would give this OEM D kernel a try, I found this linked in a framework guide for installing Ubuntu
(Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Installation on the Framework Laptop 13 - Framework Guides)
1 Like
Haha I just realized it is not October 2023 now. Man time does fly.
Quick update, new kernel 6.7.6. Still roughly the same story. Maybe it is ubuntu @ 23.10 that is the problem.
Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
6.70 W 31.4% Device Display backlight
827 mW 81.1 ms/s 496.7 Process [PID 3102] Hyprland
568 mW 9.2 ms/s 363.7 Timer tick_nohz_highres_handler
199 mW 3.4 ms/s 127.1 Process [PID 1102] [gfx_0.0.0]
134 mW 2.4 ms/s 85.8 Process [PID 17] [rcu_preempt]
125 mW 10.4 ms/s 75.8 Interrupt [117] amdgpu
118 mW 34.7 ms/s 59.9 kWork commit_work
Ubuntu is a supported os so you should be fine if you use the right one, not my field of expertise though I tend to roll a bit more bleeding edge
1 Like
FWIW, AMD FW 13 running Bluefin… PowerTop said the battery was discharging 21W, with display taking 40%. I ran through a bunch of tunables and now it says it’s discharging 9.2W and the display is taking 57.6%.
That’s a big improvement!
1 Like
If that’s idle numbers that’s still quite a lot.
It was idle-ish, but screen brightness up and a bunch of Chrome tabs open.
Right after rebooting, with the screen brightness down, it was running at 4.6W. Brightness up goes to 6.5W.
What’s a good score?
Who would have thought that reinstalling 22.04 with OEM kernel just… works.
TLDR: Installed 22.04 alongside 23.10, worked out of the box. 3.6W Idle at 30% without tuning kernel cmd-line wise.
1 Like
I just bought mine recently (will arrive on Tuesday) and it said specifically don’t use the regular kernel in an email yesterday - those who purchased it earlier, would not have gotten that I’m guessing as it keeps getting updated and improved, there should be an easier way to stay on top of these things tbh.
But its always a good idea to keep going back to the guides and checking if your has been updated.
