Any way to squeeze more battery life on Linux 6.10(AMD)?

Hey there,

First of all, pleased to report that 6.10 seems to be working well, s2idle and hibernate work as expected.

I see a few enhancements have went into 6.10 for prefcore etc. Is there a way to take advantage of those and maybe other new sysfs tweaks to squeeze a bit more battery life?

Thanks!

David

You can try this:

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I have noticed that video playback on FW16 uses a lot of GPU power, even when the video is paused. AMD are working on a fix. I think it would save some battery power when they fix that.

https://lore.kernel.org/amd-gfx/20240710205907.190580-1-boyuan.zhang@amd.com/T/#m9d2dac3d657e6317cc2b9ebd591a9cd132768480

Those patches improve the situation for VCN power consumption.

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When kernel version do you think they will land?

6.12 for sure, maybe a later 6.11rc

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Might spin up an AUR if it applies cleanly to 6.10

It at least kinda does, though I was too dumb to apply the patch to the arch 6.10 kernel sources and ended up just pulling marios whole 6.10 branch to build but that’s probably a skill issue.

Yeah here are the patches backported to 6.10:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/superm1/linux.git/log/?h=superm1/vcn-dpg-6.10

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For anyone on Arch I resurrected my AUR power-profiles-daemon package with these patches.
Thanks for the great work Mario!

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I have 2 RAM chips in my FW16. Is there any way to power off one of the chips to save power?
I only need the full 64GB occasionally.
I could make do with 32GB most of the time.
Maybe even down clock the RAM at runtime to save power.

Similarly for CPU cores. For web browsing I probably only need 1 of the 16 cores.
Even though I can configure them to be stopped, it does not appear to save any power.

CPU cores go into ACPI C3 when not in use. If you offline them using Linux sysfs interface the same thing happens. (You can look at the play dead code for more context).

But the only time the the CCD turns off (goes into CC6) is when they’re ALL not in use.

The other biggest power savings for the CCD comes from the correct policies for ASPM. The changes for this already went into 6.9 and later though and I did confirm they worked on Framework 13.

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AUR (en) - linux-amdvcnfix here’s an AUR with the patches for 6.10.3.

Only other thing I changed was LZ4 compression for hibernate images which makes restore from hibernate more snappy.

Warning though I’ve had problems importing GPG keys, but could be a me problem. Use makepkg --skippgpcheck as a last resort.