Submitted by MagicFab on Sat, 01/12/2013 - 16:21
Revision of Optimizing battery time from Tue, 04/02/2013 - 21:27
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The following information can be used with a new Trisquel installation or while using your system to try and optimize battery time. This is mostly useful on laptops.
This information should also be valid for most Ubunu derivatives and for Debian. Keep in mind this was tested on a system running Trisquel 6 (based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS).
Tips & tricks
- Suspend the system when not using it;
- Disable every device that won't be used in the BIOS: Bluetooth, WiMAX, Wireless WAN (3G), touchpad (~2W total savings), and specially wake-on-lan which keeps the LAN port active (1W savings);
- Check your power usage statistics with the gnome-power-statistics command
- Set an automatic decrease of the luminosity after some time of inactivity;
- Deactivate the Bluetooth/Wifi when not using it (for a long time). This can sometimes be achieved through a hardware switch;
- Replacing a hard drive by a solid state one should improve battery life as it requires less power;
- Disabling the sound card: this will save around 2W (up to 5% battery life):
- Right-click on the speaker in the task bar and choose "Sound preferences"
- In the "Hardware" tab, click on your sound card, then select the profile "Off"
Useful Packages
- linux-libre (homepage): Upgrade your kernel to latest linux-libre. There are two PPAs making this available (based on a forum discussion about both):
- laptop-mode-tools (homepage) : Tools for Power Savings based on battery/AC status
Laptop mode is automatically enabled after installing this package. Check the ArchLinux extensive documentation about this. - powertop (homepage) - tool to find out what is using power on a laptop
- rovclock - utility to control frequency rates of your Radeon card
Check the Thinkwiki rovclock documentation about this package
Blacklist kernel modules
Do you never or seldomly use things like bluetooth, sd card reader, joystick, parallel port? Disable the kernel modules by adding to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.confblacklist bluetooth blacklist firewire_core blacklist firewire_ohci blacklist yenta_socket blacklist joydev blacklist sdhci true blacklist sdhci_pci true blacklist dm_crypt blacklist tifm_7xx1 blacklist shpchp blacklist lp blacklist btrfs blacklist parportAnd then run
sudo update-initramfs -u and restart. You can find out what modules are loaded using the lsmod command. If you want a very terse info about a module, you can sudo modinfo modulename. These modules might get automatically loaded when actually needed or if not, you can sudo modprobe modulename to insert.
Remove excess VTs
Do you use virtual terminals 3-6? I don't so I got rid of them by removing /etc/init/tty3.conf ... /etc/init/tty6.conf and rebooted.Runtime PM
When you run powertop you might notice many devices have runtime power management disabled. You can enable them all by echoing auto to their control files as super user, e.g. in a startup script. You can find a list of such files withls /sys/bus/{pci,i2c}/devices/*/power/control
PCIe ASPM
Some newer hardware and BIOSes support PCIe active state power management. You can checkdmesg|grep -i aspm to see how your system is doing. You can try forcing it by adding to grub configuration, on the kernel line pcie_aspm=force and then running update-grub and rebooting. Watch out for hangs.
Radeon power management
Find out what video card you have bylspci|grep VGA. If you have an AMD (ATI) radeon video card, read the driver manual page, man radeon. For example to enable Dynamic Clock Gating and Power Management, enter into /etc/X11/xorg.conf (does not exist by default): Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "radeon"
Option "ClockGating" "true"
Option "DynamicPM" "true"
EndSection
save and reboot, now grep -i dyn /var/log/Xorg.0.log should produce[ 17.806] (II) RADEON(0): Dynamic Clock Gating Enabled
[ 17.806] (II) RADEON(0): Dynamic Power Management Enabled
