pathetic

Battery life of my HP mini with WinXP: 3-5 hours, depending on use. (I hear Win7 is better.)

Battery life of my HP mini with Fedora 11: struggling to get one hour.

Pathetic.

[Ed. later: should have mentioned that this is having done everything powertop suggests. Top culprit seems to be hrtimer_start_range_ns, which is much discussed but has no solution that I can find.]

15 thoughts on “pathetic”

  1. What does powertop say is causing the most wakeups? iirc, firefox and mono cause a lot of wakeups. Another issue is that the kernel doesn’t support suspending individual devices properly yet. Especially usb autosuspend is buggy.

  2. You’re lucky, my X200 got 3-4 hours when I first got it and can barely get 5-6 when I’ve powertopped it to hell. Ootb with Windows is 8-9 … :(

  3. I’d kill for 3-4 hours. I’d hoped to use this to edit photos while on plane trips during the honeymoon. If I get one hour, I might as well not bring it. :/

  4. What’s concerning is that, in general, we’re *not* that bad. I’ll try to get hold of one of these and figure out what’s going on. Timer wakeups aren’t going to explain that much of a difference, unless they’re also accompanied by high levels of CPU usage.

    1. It looks like I may also have been being hit by the npviewer.bin problem. With that gone (i.e., basically not using the web), I’m up to nearly two hours. Which is still pathetic.

      Other potential culprits: the webcam (I don’t use it) and… oh, hrm:
      9.6% (134.9) : uhci_hcd:usb5, eth1, i915@pci:0000:00:02.0, HDA Intel

      eth1 is my proprietary shit wireless card (fuck you, HP hardware whitelist) but i915 is obviously otherwise. (usb5 is presumably the webcam? dunno.)

  5. Luis,
    install flashblock so you can use flash when you wish to but you’re not compelled to everytime you go to any website. Ditto, of course, with adblockplus.

    Both of those save me a good bit of power and sanity,
    -sv

  6. Regarding the webcam, have you tried unloading its driver (the kernel module)? On my EeePC the webcam causes lots of wakeups as well, and unloading the uvcvideo module disables the webcam and prevents these wakeups. Alternatively, “echo auto > /sys/bus/usb/devices/5-8/power/level” seems to help as well while keeping the webcam working.

    Btw. maybe you could post a “screenshot” of powertop output somewhere?

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