I like having power profiles, Windows not so much though. Have you tested any of the profiles in the tuned-profiles package on Linux? If those are not as suited as the Windows ones, porting the latter to files usable by tuned-profiles would be really neat!
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We haven’t set up profiles for tuned-profiles, but that is something we can explore (and hopefully folks here can share their own tunings in the meantime)
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I’ll be running Linux on it primarily. I’m sure other folks will be too and we all can report back progress as we go of course!
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Does anyone know of other laptops that have the similar specs of the Framework Laptop to see how their battery life has compared?
I know that expecting M1-levels of battery life is not realistic since that is an ARM device, but it would be cool to see if the framework laptop could last at least more than 3 hours of light gaming or using graphic designing software
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The only ones reasonably comparable I have found were the Acer Spin 5 for the i5 version and the Huawei Matebook X Pro 2021 for the less expensive i7. Although the Acer has a touchscreen (so it should theoretically be a bit worse on battery life), the review I read suggested that 15h of battery life were feasible. 10,5 hours were reported for the Huawei (different reviewer and higher resolution screen, so not a perfect comparison to the Acer or the Framework). I guess the “true”/average battery life for the Framework is somewhere between those two numbers, although of course heavily dependant on your usage and power profile.
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@Nick_Martin and @Jason_Hottelet
For Linux you have much more control if you wanted to control the power envelope yourself. you can use the sysfs interface for the intel-rapl driver to adjust the power limits:
Eg you can set your PL1 (long term) and PL2 (short term) power limits in uW:
echo 1 > /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/enabled
#PL1
echo 28000000 > /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/constraint_0_power_limit_uw
#PL2
echo 64000000 > /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/constraint_1_power_limit_uw
From what I have found there is not a good way for the major window managers to control power profiles that are built into gnome/kde/etc. But it would be interesting to explore more.
You can read about the interface here, it is pretty cool because you can also use this to monitor power usage too:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/power/powercap/powercap.html
There are a few mentions of intel projects for linux.
https://01.org/linux-thermal-daemon/documentation/introduction-thermal-daemon
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Oh WOW! This was an interesting find. My 6 years old Intel ThinkPad has this as well. Works like a charm. I can see this being useful if you know you’re not gonna use the laptop for heavy workload (ensuring any runaway apps don’t kill your battery).
So i noticed nobody has answered the main question yet. How many hours do you get out of the battery?
As noted multiple times above, it’ll depend entirely on how you set up your power profile(s). However, to cut to the chase, most of the early reviewers seem to be getting 7-8 hours using the stock settings with no tweaking.
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Since batch 1 has already shipped a while ago, I assume a lot of people already had time to play around with the laptop. I am wondering, what actual battery life performance are people getting using linux? Ars technica reported good performance in their tests, but I’ve seen a small number of people mention really poor battery life performance in the forums. What are other people’s experiences?
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with kernel 4.18.0-305.10.2.el8_4.x86_64 from rocky linux, I got just under 2.5h last night while watching netflix. It was sitting on a blanket w/ temps between 50 and 70C. @nrp mentioned toying with tuned, so I took a look. by default its in max-throughput mode, so I’ll give max-powersaver a try sometime and report again.
Here’s what tuned says this morning.
11:04:52> tuned-adm list
Available profiles:
- accelerator-performance - Throughput performance based tuning with disabled higher latency STOP states
- balanced - General non-specialized tuned profile
- desktop - Optimize for the desktop use-case
- hpc-compute - Optimize for HPC compute workloads
- intel-sst - Configure for Intel Speed Select Base Frequency
- latency-performance - Optimize for deterministic performance at the cost of increased power consumption
- network-latency - Optimize for deterministic performance at the cost of increased power consumption, focused on low latency network performance
- network-throughput - Optimize for streaming network throughput, generally only necessary on older CPUs or 40G+ networks
- optimize-serial-console - Optimize for serial console use.
- powersave - Optimize for low power consumption
- throughput-performance - Broadly applicable tuning that provides excellent performance across a variety of common server workloads
- virtual-guest - Optimize for running inside a virtual guest
- virtual-host - Optimize for running KVM guests
Current active profile: throughput-performance
Here’s sensors from last night. (on battery, on a blanket, load: netflix)
iwlwifi_1-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +36.0°C
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +59.8°C (crit = +210.0°C)
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0: +71.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0: +71.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1: +52.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2: +56.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3: +52.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
But yea, to answer your question@Oskars_Cizevskis, It got about 2.5h.
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Anyone have any comments on real-life battery life under Windows?
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Ran the same “test” again in powersave mode. lasted about 3h50m, so pretty dramatic. Here’s the temps under about the same conditions (same load, same blanket).
iwlwifi_1-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +39.0°C
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +58.8°C (crit = +210.0°C)
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0: +56.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0: +52.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1: +55.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2: +50.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3: +54.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
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3-4 hours from a full charge sounds way off. Is Linux known to not be as battery-optimized as Windows out of the box?
There’s a second thread you may be interested in Performance, CPU temp, and battery life on Linux - #17 by A_L
I’m getting a bit longer on a newer kernel (5.13) with tuned set up, about 5-6 hours while browsing/watching videos with Firefox.
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@Framework, seems like the HDMI expansion card is taking up around 1W of power (with no HDMI cable plugged in), which seems quite high. Did a ton of A/B tests on both Fedora and Windows, but basically idle and normal usage discharge rates are ~1W higher with the HDMI expansion card plugged in, vs. without.
The USB-C and USB-A cards seem to draw a negligible difference.
Right now, I’m running with the HDMI expansion card unplugged, and I don’t have another card to fill that hole 
. Also, is there any way to disable the HDMI card from drawing power? Tried a few things in Windows and Linux (using Powertop: Tunables tab, turn “Bad” to “Good” for “Autosuspend for USB device HDMI Expansion Card [Framework]”), but doesn’t seem to help.
Some general battery life information:
I’ve done a fair share of testing battery discharge rates in both Windows and Linux.
Will do a longer write up later, but tldr:
PSR (Panel Self Refresh) saves about 0.5W, which works in Windows but unfortunately is broken (stuttering issues) in Linux for now.
Have been able to hit peak low idle discharge rates (5% display brightness, keyboard light off, 2x8GB 2400MHz (to upgrade soon 
), PSR on):
Fedora 34: ~2.2W (so ~2.8W with faulty PSR off)
Windows 10: ~2.6W
But usually it’s around 3W-4W. Seems PSR is needed to achieve C10 states, which save that extra ~0.5W. If PSR is off, only C8 can be achieved. Can check C-States via Powertop on Linux, or ThrottleStop on Windows.
Power profiles:
Windows: battery saver mode
Fedora: I’m using Bastien Nocera / power-profiles-daemon · GitLab and using the “power-saver” mode
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@Michael_Wu Under what circumstances was this energy usage recorded? Did you change anything else in the BIOS? I’m curious what your real-life usage is (browsing on firefox for example), because I’m nowhere near 2.8W (5 W with literally nothing but KDE up), with most of the recorded usage by the backlight. I practically get 6 hours or so with tuned while browsing.
For HDMI, I used powertop2tuned:
sudo dnf install tuned \
tuned-switcher \
tuned-gtk \
tuned-utils
sudo powertop --calibrate
sudo powertop2tuned -e -n power-saver --force
sudo vi /etc/tuned/power-saver/tuned.conf
sudo tuned-adm profile power-saver
Depending on what slot it’s plugged in, you should have something like
# Autosuspend for USB device HDMI Expansion Card [Framework]
/sys/bus/usb/devices/3-3/power/control=auto
in your tuned.conf. With this setting, I don’t see the 1W usage by the HDMI card.
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My personal expectation (even before I ordered) is that any module that does conversion from USB-C to other things is going to draw power, and only removing the module will stop that.
I’m OK with that because I ordered extra modules.
The only thing I changed in the bios was turning PS/2 Mouse Emulation? From auto → disabled (iirc) when I first got the laptop diagnosing touchpad issues, and left it like that. Oh and setting up the EFI boot sequence!
Hardware:
- CPU: DIY 1165G7
-
Memory: 16GB (2x8GB SK Hynix 2400MHz sticks from an old Dell XPS 15 9550)
SSD: 512GB (LITEON CA3-8D512 from an old 2018 Huawei Matebook X Pro)
WIFI: AX210 from Framework
2.8W was recorded under:
- Fedora 34
- Gnome 40 for a standard/baseline, extensions disabled (though
- powertop --auto-tune (all tunables set to good)
- power-saver profile using power-profiles-daemon
- No expansion card connected
- PSR disabled
- 5% display brightness
- Keyboard backlight off
Note, I primarily use Sway with Waybar (1.6.1-3, wlroots 0.14.1-2 pulled from F35 repo). Though I think Waybar and/or my config is drawing some unnecessary power, so Sway alone with no Waybar seems to consume similar to Gnome 40. Gnome 40 seems to be pretty power efficient, shrugs
Surprisingly, removing the AX210 card entirely vs. being connected to my wifi (though I’m right by my wireless AP) seemed to make negligible difference in power consumption.
I just checked, with Sway/Waybar + Microsoft Edge Beta, 5 tabs of the Framework forum ;), and powertop, I idle in the low 4W. Note in my Waybar at the top, cpu frequency is wrong. The battery current is correct and usually matches up with powertop, but it’s set to a lower refresh interval so I can keep an eye out on battery drain, for now. I think it spiked when I went to screenshot, or something. Edit: display brightness at 30%, speakers at 75%, wifi connected, bt on but not connected to anything.) Edit 2: I’m pretty sure powertop’s reporting of nic:virbr0 is incorrect.
Edge is currently running off XWayland, might be more efficient with native Wayland.
I think with regular browser usage, with a fair number of tabs, I idle maybe 5-7W?
I can give concrete numbers later, and also test with Firefox, XWayland and Wayland. Are there any websites you’d like me to open and keep idle for testing purposes?
Also, for video playback, hardware encoding and VA-API make a pretty substantial difference, about 1-2W less with a 1080P file. 30% brightness, 75% speakers with Wayland MPV + VA-API, I saw around ~6-6.5W during playback (iirc). Got around the same in Windows 10 using the default media player, same file.
Note: power-saver profile with power-profiles-daemon seems to make a huge difference, and it also seems to cap max frequency at 1600MHz.
I haven’t really done much real-world usage testing (and it really depends on my workflow/what I’m doing), but from the last few days tinkering/testing, I’d estimate I can get around the same battery life as Windows 10 just looking at discharge rates, or perhaps more (perhaps less). Fans seem to spin up less in Fedora – I don’t plan on using Windows for an entire full battery discharge, but I can test if anyone needs.
Edit: @Michael_Lingelbach, just double checking, do you have any rogue tasks taking up cpu cycles? I had this happen to me, and came across a fix:
Basically, I saw that kworker/u16:X+events_unbound was causing like 99% usage on a thread randomly, eating up battery. sudo btrfs balance / + a reboot seemed to have fixed it, though.
Whew, that was a lot of stuff, might be messy cause I just kinda dumped all this. I have numbers written down that I plan on (hopefully) putting together, and doing another run through – hope this helps!
As for powertop2tuned, are you sure that setting is actually working? I did that in powertop tunables, with:
echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/3-4/power/control'
And it seems like it does nothing. Hm, maybe I need to persist the setting, and reboot…
Have you tried physically disconnecting the HDMI expansion card and seeing if it makes a difference? I’m going to try powertop2tuned, thanks – will report back!
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