Gluglug X60 and tweaking the battery usage
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The battery is not new. And already reported by the Gnome applet as of lower capacity. That plus the fact that one load holds for less than 2 hours, I wanted to preserve the battery.
I know from other sites that when holding the battery in the laptop and charging it it can help loading it only to 80%. Given the X60 is very hot, and while plugged in it can get even hotter, that would be a last resort to save some battery.
ThinkWiki has been of great help so far. They say tp_smapi module would have the said functionality. I downloaded that and compiled it.
FATAL: Error inserting tp_smapi (/lib/modules/3.2.0-58-generic-pae/extra/tp_smapi.ko): No such device
So probably coreboot lacks the functionality. Any other way out?
There are some tips here https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/optimizing-battery-time
I have already read and tried it. But that's an excellent suggestion anyway. My Gluglug X60 sucks 32-35W with the battery pulled off, no docking station and only the internal Wifi on. I got scarred. I checked the laptop of a friend, a 3 year old Samsung about the same screen size and that sucks 8-11W in the same conditions. No wonder the battery is dead in less than two hours.
When the CPU is idle, it runs at a lower speed. There is a bug in coreboot that the motherboard makes a high pitched whine under this scenario.
A workaround is to disable CPU throttling (the CPU then runs always at full speed).
This has the effect of reducing battery life. Also, the backlight is fixed at 100% (another limitation in coreboot when native graphics is used instead of the nonfree VBIOS).
Options 5-8 in the GRUB menu do the same as options 1-4, but without idle=halt.
This will mean that the CPU throttles again (lower speed) when idle, and will reduce power usage during most use cases (therefore increasing battery life).
Right. Now I know it. But it sure wasn't obvious.
Now I also know what idle=halt means.
If you install and configure package powernap you can save battery. By default it will push the X60 into powersave mode fairly quickly, if you also add a Stage 2 action to suspend after a few minutes then your X60 will waste less battery being there when you're not actively using it.
Never heard of it. Does it need special configuration? I would like to try it.
@elodie
FYI, there was an issue with my Gluglug X60s battery. It was no longer providing power to the laptop despite it showing that it was fully charged. Mr. Rowe explained that this also occurred with another customer and after investigation discovered it was a fault with the battery. He is dispatching a new battery to me this week.
My battery is older. It was already used as it can't fill up to the maximum reported value. But it does not seem to have this issue.
How many minutes do you get from a full load? Does the laptop heat up badly?
Just got around to calibrating my new battery tonight. I'll report back after I finish calibrating it and let you know. I have had no issue to date with the laptop heating up.
The key is the boot time parameter idle=halt. The sound seems to be a problem with coreboot and the motherboard. So, if the faint high pitched noise is not a problem, than the usage time improves. From 30-35W consumption at the wallplug, I now get below 20W with the WiFi on and music decoding in the background. For reading a text and everything else stopped I get down to 11-13W. And don't forget the screen backlighting is at full power.
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