Hello! im having an issue where power drain on my framework 16 causes my battery to only last about 3-4 hours with an idle power draw of 25 watts.
I’m using Manjaro latest with the latest bios 4.03 and kernel 6.12.73-1-MANJARO
I have switched between tuned-ppd and power-profiles-daemon and nothing has made much of a difference. I have also turned off limit the GPU to PCIe gen 3 in the BIOS because when plugged in it would not use the full capacity of the GPU but this did not effect power usage that much on battery.
I have tried nearly everything ive found with power management but have not been able to make it last for more than 4 hours.
Any help would be appreciated I can provide any extra system information if needed.
As a point of reference, you should be able to achieve ~10W idle draw without doing anything extreme, and record setting minimum power draws are around 5-7W. At least for the 78040HS units.
How are your temps, are the fans blaring like crazy? Fans should be off entirely during idle conditions.
What is your CPU utilization?
Is your dGPU on? Use a command like cat /sys/class/drm/card1/device/power_stateto get the power state. It should say d3Cold. Do NOT use an application/tool like nvtop to check, as those turn the dGPU on and keep it on. When nothing is using the dGPU, it only takes about 5 seconds for it to turn off.
Also, I’ve tested tuned-ppd, power-profiles-daemon, and autofreq-control (a couple years ago, granted) and found that power-profiles-daemon achieved the lowest power draw on battery.
I can usually achieve that low of power draw when my screen brightness is at zero but either sometimes I forget to turn it down or I get annoyed cause I cant see anything hoping for kde to update to the version where they added support for that.
My temps are fine and I never hear the fans when its on battery and the CPU usually hovers around 20%(?) I haven’t actually done any measurements for that.
The dGPU stays off during battery and I checked that /sys location and it does say its off.
I would stay with ppd but for some reason it does not launch using systemd but manually it does and I haven’t been able to figure it out. ill keep an eye on the CPU stats and look more into the ppd problem today and report on what that says about usage time.
20% would be incredibly high for what I consider “idle”. When I’m idling, I sit at 0% usage with an occasional spike to 4-7%. I’d recommend looking into whatever is using your CPU, that seems likely to be the culprit. 20% is higher than my CPU load while playing some simpler games like TF2.
Yeah its actually hovering around 5-10% idle (with discord and Firefox and such) I imagine its mostly my screen brightness since it dosent adjust itself and I don’t like that the colors get funky at lower brightness’s.
Ive tried powertop but that likes to turn off my keyboard after a few seconds because of the power savings and I dont want to have to go in every boot to turn that specific setting off. if there is some config file for it that can allow me to keep specific things on I would be more than willing to use it.
The profile I use is the default powersave profile when on battery
Most of the high usage CPU processes are things I cant just disable like kwin or firefox.
I tried the suggustion above with powertop and tuned and messed with the profiles a bit and got it down to about 10 watts idle and 15 watts with just a web browser and typing this response and the CPU usage is around 5-10 with mostly firefox and 0% display brightness.
I’d say 10-15W w/ browser usage is far more typical for what I’ve seen. That’s not screaming “somethings’s wrong” to me, but 25W during idle definitely was. This seems more like expected behavior. Note that you may have some more optimization available to you, such as I stopped a process called baloo from running when I ran arch (BTW) because I didn’t need it’s caching capabilities and it ate a ton of power. 10-15W is what I get during what I would call light-moderate use. I’ve got apps open like steam, discord, web browser, actively using the mouse/keyboard and maybe some of the content has animations.
10-15W draw translates to 5.5 → 8hrs of battery. That’s roughly double what you were at before.
Also as an FYI, those “colors” that get messed with at lower brightness, that’s a power optimization feature. On KDE Plasma, you can diable that in the display settings by setting the “prefer power savings” to “prefer color accuracy” (terms might be slightly different)
Hmm alright I guess I was more used to my old laptop which used like 7 watts idle ant 15 under load but that was an old dell laptop from 2013 but I still expected slimier battery life with the fw 16 (I got about 6 hours out of that old laptop). The archwiki was updated to include the automatic brightness management for the keyboard and display (Manjaro PLEASE update plasma) so that helped.
I use baloo for when it indexes files for plasma to search through which I use often but I might be able to use the script.sh for tuned to turn it off on battery.
I usually keep the color accuracy on because there’s weird graphical glitches when its off and they were annoying me.
Ill post to this thread with all the changes I did assuming im happy with the results after I get that all together.