[TRACKING] Battery flipping between charging and discharging / Draws from battery even on AC

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
88

Very considerate, thank you. Support will provide a one liner that works in a similar fashion. :slightly_smiling_face:

89

Of course, now that I am trying to force this to happen, I cannot get it to trigger. I disabled the service provided by @real_or_random , and I think I reverted the EC settings looking through it, but I cannot get this to happen and it’s been three days.

If there is anything you can think of that I missed in the list below I would be happy to keep driving this with support if I can break it again.

Changes

  • Manually stopped charge-limiter.service

    systemctl stop charge-limiter.service

  • Disabled charge-limiter.service

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  • Reverted chargecurrentlimit to “NO_LIMIT” (4294967295) by hand (tested with fw-ectool as well)

     ectool chargecurrentlimit 4294967295

  • Tested recreation script (fw-ectool changed from original as I have both ectool and fw-ectool on my system now)

    #!/bin/bash
while true; do
   date ; fw-ectool fwchargelimit 30 ; fw-ectool console | grep "Battery\|Charge Limit" ; sleep 60 ; date ; fw-ectool fwchargelimit 99 ; fw-ectool console | grep "Battery\|Charge Limit";  sleep 10
done

  • Have run in state with service disabled for 3 days (2 of normal workload, 1 of light workload)

90

Do you still have a battery limit <100% set in the BIOS? Have you tried the script with a battery level between 31% and 99%? This is required for the fwchargelimit commands to be effective. (Only then fwchargelimit 30 stops charging and fwchargelimit 99 starts charging.)

Otherwise you may actually be lucky. I can still reproduce it reliably with the script.

91

Yea, I used the script, and I still have it set to 80% charge in the BIOS. I agree that I may be lucky (though it feels the opposite now that I am trying to capture it), I also ran for months before I encountered this before. I will go ahead and leave it in this state, and see if I can get it to come back.

92

Had to smile because I can relate (for me, it was something with my car) I digress.

Do keep us posted. :slight_smile:

93

I finally captured it, and got an exact timestamp of the disconnect. Log bundle uploaded to support.

4 Likes
94

Same problem here, with an 11gen and 13gen intel.

Original charger, original cable.

After months of this problem, I decided to keep track of the charging power with node_expoter and prometheus.

Turns out, even when fully charged, the battery will sometimes report charging of a couple mW (from 20ish to 200ish). This doesn’t seem to have a hard correlation with system usage.

But another very interesting thing I noticed after playing around with the official ubuntu battery life guide: I turned off boosting of the CPU completely with TLP. And the “battery chargin / discharging” desktop notifications are now completely gone. So the main culprit of the flipping seems to be the very short bust of required power during clock boosts.

Here’s a quick graph showing the charge value (calculated with node_power_supply_current_ampere * node_power_supply_voltage_volt from node_expoter.

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There’s a tiny bump in load when the battery ist charging for a bit, but it’s not a lot

2 Likes
95

I now spend an afternoon playing around with different settings in TLP and the result is…

confusing?

No matter what I configure now, I can’t get the power flip-flop to trigger. Even with boosting enabled. (including GPU boosting).

The “charging” power keeps at absolutely 0 in my monitoring, and the “fully charged” status doesn’t budge even for a second. And before it was happily doing it multiple times a minute, at times.

The only thing I can see is, that the maxinum CPU frequencies are not reported as high as before.

Example:

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You can see that node_exporter detects the max frequency at 4.6GHz for the P-cores. Which is the maximum spec for my 1340P. (the short down-spikes you can see are moments where I disconnected power to move the laptop).

I thought those were the actual frequencies the core will boost to, so node exporter reports those.

If I had the laptop disconnected, you can see the reported max to be lower (as boost was disabled on battery)

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But now I can’t get node_exporter to detect the 4.6GHz, no matter what I do. And I suspect that is connected with the fact that the connection is not flip-flopping anymore.

Here’s a screenshot of my current TLP CPU settings
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So, uh, I have no idea what is going on. I will keep an eye out and see if it returns after a couple reboots, maybe.

For completeness sake, I’m running Xubuntu Jammy on an Intel 1340P

96

Additionally, it seems my Ugreen 45W charger also works like a charm now.

I tested it under full load (using all cores with blender rendering)

Note: I have a system tray widget that shows me the power drain/charge from the battery by using/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/current_now and /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/voltage_now

  • started off as “fully charged”
  • after 10ish seconds, my widget showed me a battery drain of 0.5W
  • A couple seconds later it increased to 2W
  • Only after another couple seconds (maybe half a minute after starting the render), my system reported the battery discharging
  • When the render was done, the system reported normal charging of the battery
  • After it was full again, the system now is still happy with the 45W charger. I now even attached my phone to it, so the charging is halfed. Still no problems
97

Hm, I guess these settings in theory shouldn’t trigger what you see, i.e., that the CPU is limited even on AC. But I’d recommend disabling all the options, and starting from scratch.

Hm, I just took a look at Optimizing Ubuntu Battery Life, and I think the recommendations are a bit strange. In general, I’d recommend keeping most of the defaults. TLP has pretty good defaults, and many ticked checkboxes in the guide are not necessary because they correspond to the default. And where they differ, what the guide recommends can be questionable. For example, CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_AC=performance seems to be a strange recommendation. Okay, it doesn’t matter that much on AC, but performance just disables all energy CPU optimizations, even those that make sense on AC and don’t hurt performance noticeably. Also, this setting just means that CPU_ERNGERY_PERF_POLICY_ON_AC will be ignored anyway, so it’s rather confusing to set both. See intel_pstate CPU Performance Scaling Driver — The Linux Kernel documentation for details.

98

The recommendations may seem odd, but the idea is a user is either connected to power or not, thus disabling everything in terms of noticeable performance or not noticeable performance. It’s merely a suggestion based on what worked best for us.

Do try the TLP defaults to see if you end up with any difference in flipping.

99

@real_or_random agreed, that most settings don’t make much sense.

After playing around some more, I can definitely say that the boosting is causing this.
But that includes the GPU boosting!

For 2 days I now only have following settings set via TLP (and kept BAT and AC settings the same):

  • CPU_BOOST set to off
  • CPU_HWP_DYN_BOOST to off
  • GPU frequencies set to the max that is output via tlp-stat -g, but set the boost frequency to the regular max frequency, so it doesn’t boost up.

Important: it seems that TLPUI doesn’t always load the new settings when saving, so a quick tlp start is often needed to actually apply the changes (I suspect this behavior screwed with some of the tests I did before)

This works on a i7-1260P as well as i5-1340P framework

100

Do keep sharing what you find as I lack the cycles right now to dedicate specific time to replicate this. If you find something hyper-specific we can improve in docs, awesome share how you arrived there and with your specific hardware and TLP config.

101

The other day I had some rare flipping again, and I suspect it’s because my kernel got updated from oem-22.04c to the generic one.

Some of the TLP settings didn’t seem to apply with the generic kernel running (mostly the CPU performance settings).

I switched to the newer oem-22.04d and the problem went away again

1 Like
102

Glad to hear this resolved itself. We do have a little application that installed, will monitor for changes in the kernel and alert you.

103

On my 11th Gen, IF I have an external hub plugged into the back right USB C port, the back left USB C port where I have the power plug will flip-flop between charging and discharging the battery. The solution is a kludge. Unplug the left power for a second and plug it back in. The system then prioritizes that USB C port or so it seems to this layman. The other way to go here is to not plug in the right-hand USB C hub until after the laptop powers up, in which case no flip-flopping. (This on Windows 11 Pro)

104

I get similar behaviour on the framework 13 amd with ec3.03 watching the EC console I see no events for when it’s been booted powered from the left PD port after an unplug. I get an event again from the right. But it’s not complete and there is a TODO message in the EC console about implementing PD port switching logic. Suspending unplugged seems to bring proper AC powered messages back again after resume when plugging on either side

105

What I don’t understand is why the right USB C port causes problems?

106

Are both right ports affected by this?

107

II was responding to jwp who has done a more detailed study of the issue. Mine was the left back port flip-flopping. My guess would be that having a usb hub plugged in to the right back port reduces the power to the left meaning that there is no dedicated power plug USB C port at all.