Ubuntu 11.10 Power Consumption Up By As Much As ~50%

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 11.10 Power Consumption Up By As Much As ~50%

The Linux power regressions are not over. The power consumption with Ubuntu 11.04 dramatically increased due to a PCI Express Active-State Power Management change. This was after another major power regression in an earlier upstream kernel release. The Linux PCI-E ASPM support is still not improved, so the 11.04 power regression remains in Ubuntu 11.10 and other upstream Linux distributions shipping Linux 2.6.38+, but that's not all. The power situation in Ubuntu 11.10 is dramatically worsened...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTg5Mg

[mendieta]

Michael

You have been posting wonderful info. I think it would be great if you would attach to your articles on this topic a simple, easy to implement recipe for the workaround (I added a bunch of linux kernel boot parameters to the grub config file based on these articles, but one single source would be great for the general public)

Thanks, and keep it up!

[pablomme]

the power consumption with Ubuntu 11.10 is up by 52%. In other words, the battery life can be effectively halved with Ubuntu 11.10 compared to Ubuntu 11.04

Quick note: if power consumption increases by 50%, battery life decreases by 33% (not 50%!). You need a 100% increase in power to produce a 50% decrease in battery life.

Not to say the trend is not worrying...

[Rambo Tribble]

... Linus may have to consider using decrements for new versions, instead of increments.

[Sadako]

Considering all the reports about battery life decreasing with each recent kernel version, just thought I'd add that battery life has actually improved for me, I get about 8.25 hours on a full charge with 3.0.4, as opposed to 7.5 with 2.6.39.4, which considering the manufacturer states up to 8 hours for this model, and they always exagerate such figures, I consider to be pretty damn good...

I measured this by simply disabling dpms and just letting the laptop sit there discharging, wireless and bluetooth were turned off and no ethernet plugged in, this is with intel 4500mhd graphics.

[blackshard]

ubuntu 11.04 on my hp dv5 system had a bad laptop-mode default configuration.
Just for an example, it will completely deactivate my hard disk driver power management features, and I'm not talking about stop disk spinning, but rather electronics power saving features. The temperatures of the disk went to absurd levels too. I had to manually correct those issues.

[lgstoian]

Wow is all I have to say. This is getting abit out of hand. I should test this on my netbook if the power drain has actually increased that much it would really be on par with the one I get under Haiku. Which in translation would mean Damm it's bad !
Well then again I am a battery life freak. Downgrading to Xp just cuz I get 30 more minutes of battery life.

[_ONH_]

Does this bloob also aplies to the latest fedora or suse distro with the same kernel also that much or not?
Because then its a problem for me as I don't use Ubuntu since it failed to start on my Laptop with 6.04 I think, whereas other distros worked more or less out of the box.

[dargllun]

Michael - I'm wondering if I'm reading that system table right: you say you're comparing clean install's, so why uses that one system GNOME 2.32.2 and not Unity as Desktop? Given the poor state Unity is in at the moment, it might as well have an impact on power consumption.

[lgstoian]

I suspected he wanted to make the tests as fair as possible as he is comparing older versions of Ubuntu that use the gnome desktop. Unity is not only knew but highly gpu depended. if he used it the power consumption would of probably been through the roof.