[RESPONDED] Extreme power consumption at idle

Community Support
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My partner recently got a Framework Laptop 13 (i7-1260P, 64GB Crucial DDR4-3200, Solidigm P44). Four USB-C expansion cards only. It’s running firmware v3.06 beta.

I’m trying to help her troubleshoot power management issues, including unusually high power consumption and problems with changing power states.

Typical 12-13W of battery drain at idle, 17-18W while poking at Framework Community in firefox. This seems to be completely out of line with others’ experiences of idle power with this config.

Also, when the OS attempts to changes power states from S0 to S3, S4, or S5, the laptop’s screen goes blank, the power button stays lit, the fans spin up, and the laptop heats up. This continues until the laptop is force powered off. This seems like an EC failure?

I did some more in-depth testing.

My testing setup for the power consumption issue: I tried to create an ideal scenario. Completely stock Fedora 38 install disk, with kernel 6.2, loaded into RAM. Flash drive unplugged. SSD removed. Webcam, microphone disabled with the hardware switches. Fingerprint sensor disabled in firmware settings. Bluetooth and WiFi off. Backlight is at the lowest possible setting. Ran powertop auto tune, disabled and masked power-profiles-daemon. Enabled TLP, set PCIE ASPM to powersupersave and disabled turbo boost on battery, restarted TLP. powertop shows all tunables at “good”.

Stock GNOME, on Wayland, running only two terminals: one running powertop, the other running watch -n 5 sensors. No disk activity. Used powertop to monitor CPU and power stats. Frequency stays around the minimum possible, with the average for all CPUs in the range of 520-750 MHz. All CPUs show that they’re in C10 state ranging from 98% to 99.9% of the time.

powertop displays a battery discharge rate hovering around 9.5-10.5W for this configuration. The CPU is at around 40°C and the fan is off. From what I’ve gathered, I should be seeing a power draw of around 2-3W.

Is this power consumption a hardware issue, something with the EC or other components on the motherboard?

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Try the following: 1) Verify that TLP is configured to turn turbo off on battery. 2) Run sudo powertop --calibrate. If you don’t calibrate it you can and will get high readings. 3) Consider adding thermald which does technically “throttle” the cpu a bit, but ensures more consistent overall performance, and smooths out the thermal profile. 4) What BIOS are you running?

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  1. It is.
  2. First thing I did.
  3. This wouldn’t help much, as the issue is with power draw at idle, where the CPUs are mostly at 90-95% C10 state and their lowest frequency.
  4. latest beta. 3.06
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Just thinking aloud here:

  • Does powertop show where this power is going, perhaps in terms of interrupts?
  • Does anything change if you disable the WiFi/BT radios with airplane mode?
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I’ve edited my initial post to add more detail.

Very little change from disabling bluetooth and wifi. Unplugging the SSD decreased power consumption from 12-13W to 9.5-10.5W, but that’s still wayyy too high.

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With the additional details this sounds more like a hardware issue. I would open a ticket with support.

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I did think of one other possibility. The SElinux context of your tlp configuration file could be off I would run restorecon -Fvr on /etc and see if it fixes any thing. Also you could run ausearch -m avc -ts today and see if you are getting ay alerts related to tlp.

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Experienced this issue on other Linux distros too, and tlp logs show no errors…

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Hi @Anna_Kudriavtsev, welcome to the forums,

Yes it’s looking like a hardware issue as @nadb suggested, you may want to open a support ticket for more in depth debugging and possible resolution.

cheers. :slight_smile:

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I wonder if this is what you’re experiencing:

How did you turn it off?

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I am seeing the same behavior with a very similar setup:

i7-1260P
32GB Crucial DDR4-3200
WD Black SN750 (WDS100T3X0C)

Fedora 38 Silverblue
Linux 6.2.13-300.fc38.x86_64
Firmware 3.06 (via lvfs-testing)

My idle power consumption with screen brightness set to minimum and nothing open is ~10W, and powertop shows the CPU Pkg rarely makes it below C2 (0.3% C10 very rarely).

I also notice a regression in which the screen hitching/corruption issues that were seen back in Fedora 35 have returned, requiring disable of PSR. (The above observations are true regardless of PSR enabled/disabled FWIW.)

EDIT: I re-flashed the 3.06 firmware using Framework’s flasher instead of fwupd and I now get the expected power levels (down to ~3W with no peripherals, minimum brightness, no KB backlight/WiFi/BT). I think there was a snag updating the “Retimer” when using fwupd, but I didn’t investigate further. The PSR hitching remains, however.

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