Improving Linux Laptop Battery Life

[TBSN]

Linux can be very easy to set up and many distros are great out-of-the-box, but I've been a little disappointed by the power-saving options. I've been trying to figure out the best way to up the battery life and I thought I'd share some of the info I found. Maybe this is old news to most people, if so, sorry...

http://www.LessWatts.org

I believe this site was set up by Intel (not sure) but it has some good info. PowerTop is a tool to analyze your system to determine what is wasting power.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_battery_life&num=1

More on PowerTop

http://www.go2linux.org/how-to-configure-cpufreqd

How to set up CPUfreq, which allows you to govern the CPU speed. I'm not sure if it works on AMD processors.

Anyone else have some tips? I'd like to figure out how to get the most out of PowerTop, because the suggestions it gives on configurations pop up quickly and then disappear.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I'm not sure if it works on AMD processors.

It most definitely does. This is my desktop Athlon II X4 635 (showing only one of four cores):

[mike@anonpc ~]$ cpufreq-info
cpufrequtils 007: cpufreq-info (C) Dominik Brodowski 2004-2009
Report errors and bugs to cpufreq@vger.kernel.org, please.
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: powernow-k8
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency: 8.0 us.
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 2.90 GHz
  available frequency steps: 2.90 GHz, 2.20 GHz, 1.70 GHz, 800 MHz
  available cpufreq governors: conservative, powersave, ondemand, userspace, performance
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 2.90 GHz.
                  The governor "ondemand" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 800 MHz.

 

[KeypoX]

granola?

 

[themillak]

I had granola installed for a bit but my laptop didn't have great battery life to begin with (less than 1.5 hours). Basically it looked to me like it powers down the cores to save power and i saw some improvement in my battery life from that. I ran into some problems when I let it disable my bluetooth but i've been having problems re-enabling my bluetooth after disabling it in general.

then again telling the cores to stay ramped down or on powersave mode worked well enough for me.

 

[TBSN]

I think that granola might not even be necessary after tweaking CPUfreq. I've got it installed, but it seems to stay always at 2GHz, I may need to mess with the configuration, which is a real pain.