Tweaks To Extend The Battery Life Of Intel Linux Notebooks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Tweaks To Extend The Battery Life Of Intel Linux Notebooks

While the Linux power consumption may be up on recent kernels depending upon your hardware configuration, there's a few known but not too commonly used tweaks for reducing your system power consumption and extending your battery life when using Intel integrated graphics on your favorite Linux distribution.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16326

[crispy]

I'm not quite sure what intel chips are affected by these settings. Is my 965 intel core2duo thinkpad affected?

[Znurre]

Wow, very interesting article.
Need to try some of these tweaks on my Sandy Bridge notebook.

[jakubo]

finally!
performance and power consumption in one article!

[grigi]

Some of these features, e.g. the LVDS downclocking has been in several generations of hardware. So it is worth trying it.
Posting your findings would be useful.

[myxal]

Awesome article, just a minor nitpick:

These options can be added to ... the grub.cfg file to be made permanent ...

Uhh, no. The next kernel upgrade or anything that triggers update-grub will wipe it. Put the options into the /etc/default/grub file:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="<put options here> quiet splash"

Don't forget to then run update-grub.

[CrazyIvan]

Interesting that minimal power draw with all options disabled is about 13 watts while it was 19 watts when 3.1 regression spotted. (vs about 14 watts in 3.0)
So no more additional power regressions in 3.1?

now using i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 for about a day on my asus u41sv without any hangs, power consumption down to 2.6.39 level

[glasen]

Another way, is putting the options in a file (e.g. "options.conf") under "/etc/modprobe.d":

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/options.conf

Then add the following line:

options i915 i915_enable_fbc=1 i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1

Save the file and run the following command:

sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

This way is much more elegant than putting everything in the GRUB-config file.

[SpoonMeiser]

Awesome article, just a minor nitpick:

These options can be added to ... the grub.cfg file to be made permanent ...

Uhh, no. The next kernel upgrade or anything that triggers update-grub will wipe it. Put the options into the /etc/default/grub file:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="<put options here> quiet splash"

Don't forget to then run update-grub.

Umm, no.

This is only true if this is how your specific distribution manages grub.conf. Debian does this, and I assume Ubuntu does as well, but this is not necessarily true for all distributions.

[myxal]

Umm, no.

This is only true if this is how your specific distribution manages grub.conf. Debian does this, and I assume Ubuntu does as well, but this is not necessarily true for all distributions.

As /etc/default/grub is referenced by the GRUB manual, I must assume that distros that don't use it are the "outsiders".