Hi, first time poster here. I’ve been enjoying my new Framework 16 a lot apart from some issues with battery life, which has been pretty bad. The only other modern machine I have to compare it to is an M1 Mac I use for work, which I use more and seem to need to charge much less.
The other day I was using my Framework at the airport and closed the lid before getting on a flight. I have it set to “Sleep” on lid close in KDE’s power management settings. Once I got off at the destination I could feel it being abnormally warm through my backpack, and when I took it out it was burning hot to the point of being untouchable. The fans didn’t seem to be active. I waited, rebooted it (it was unresponsive) and a good chunk of battery had been used. I’ve never seen a laptop this hot, especially in sleep mode, including others running KDE. Obviously very concerning having just got off a plane.
I think this unexpected activity in sleep mode could be the cause of the battery life issues I’ve been having in general. I’m hoping someone can help me sort this out, I love using it but can’t justify keeping a machine that gets concerningly hot and then is out of charge when I need it.
Happy to post logs etc. if pointed in the right direction.
I have had similar experience with openSuSe Leap running on Framework 16 in sleep mode. For my case I had assumed the tight fit in the bag had pressed some key and it woke up from sleep mode, but it happened a few times until the battery was depleted completely within half a day or so. Since then I have resorted to powering down the machine completely but it just makes me not use the laptop when I otherwise would have, because I have to enter 4 different passwords for encryption if I power it down completely.
I will be glad to run any tests some community member/developer recommends to get to the bottom of this issue. I tried running the amd script for sleep issues, but it gave an error related to kernel taint last time I tried.
Thanks for the reply, I can give that a shot. On a related note, do you know the best way to determine if and why it woke that time, e.g. some log file?
You can use the AMD s2idle script to tell you wake reason.
Just trigger your suspend using that but program the time longer than you expect it to be asleep. It will save a log file with all the debugging details.
Just for clarity, if the lid is closed, how do you know it is in sleep mode? You cannot see the fading in/out power led with lid closed.
On my laptop I have disabled wake on lid open, so that I can open the lid and still see if it was sleeping or not. I then press the power button to wake it.
Good question - I have it set up in KDE’s settings to sleep on lid close, and normally when I later open the lid I have a dark display and the pulsating power button LED - I assume this means it is still in sleep mode. Once I give some input I then see the KDE login screen, although potentially relevant to mention that this only works about half of the time (sometimes I just see the mouse cursor on a black screen), which I guessed was some KDE bug.
On this occasion I was mostly concerned with switching it off as fast as possible, I can’t say what the power button was doing and IIRC the screen was blank. Whether it spuriously exited sleep mode or there is some issue in sleep mode, I don’t know.