High battery usage since recently

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1

I have been using Fedora for quite a while and am a big fan. First post on this forum though.

I have been using tlp to save power and this has been working great with a typical power usage of ± 10 W on battery. However since recently (since a recent update?), battery usage on my laptop is significantly higher at ± 30 W.

I have tried power-profiles-daemon as an alternative but it didn’t lead to improvement, and then I removed it again and reinstalled tlp, but still with the same problem of high battery draining.

I also notice that fans are running more and laptop temperature seems overall higher (also in air-conditioned environments).

Any idea what caused this change and how to remedy it (in a somewhat user-friendly way)?

(lspci output below, happy to run other diagnostic tests)

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 10th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6th-10th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 02)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation CometLake-H GT2 [UHD Graphics] (rev 05)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 02)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Thermal Controller
00:13.0 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Integrated Sensor Solution
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Shared SRAM
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH CNVi WiFi
00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0
00:15.1 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #1
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake HECI Controller
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCIe Root Port #1 (rev f0)
00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCIe Root Port #7 (rev f0)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev f0)
00:1e.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH Serial IO UART Host Controller #0
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation WM490 Chipset LPC/eSPI Controller
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH cAVS
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH SMBus Controller
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Comet Lake PCH SPI Controller
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU117M [GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Mobile] (rev a1)
02:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Titan Ridge 4C 2018] (rev 06)
03:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Titan Ridge 4C 2018] (rev 06)
03:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Titan Ridge 4C 2018] (rev 06)
03:02.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Titan Ridge 4C 2018] (rev 06)
03:04.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Titan Ridge 4C 2018] (rev 06)
04:00.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 NHI [Titan Ridge 4C 2018] (rev 06)
38:00.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation JHL7540 Thunderbolt 3 USB Controller [Titan Ridge 4C 2018] (rev 06)
39:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Thunderbolt 4 Bridge [Goshen Ridge 2020] (rev 03)
3a:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Thunderbolt 4 Bridge [Goshen Ridge 2020] (rev 03)
3a:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Thunderbolt 4 Bridge [Goshen Ridge 2020] (rev 03)
3a:02.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Thunderbolt 4 Bridge [Goshen Ridge 2020] (rev 03)
3a:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Thunderbolt 4 Bridge [Goshen Ridge 2020] (rev 03)
3a:04.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Thunderbolt 4 Bridge [Goshen Ridge 2020] (rev 03)
3b:00.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Thunderbolt 4 USB Controller [Goshen Ridge 2020] (rev 03)
6c:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5260 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
6d:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Intel Corporation SSD DC P4101/Pro 7600p/760p/E 6100p Series (rev 03)

2

Fedora uses tuned for power management and is a replacement for power-profiles-daemon[1], have you checked if it’s running?

I would disable tlp & ppd, play around with tuned & tuned-ppd to see if they work just fine, it has profiles to experiment with. I was genuinely surprised how well it worked out of the box with a poor battery compared to what other distributions ship.

  1. ↩︎

1 Like
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thanks for the reminder, tuned is now indeed the default power manager. Unfortunately trying tuned didn’t help me.

However what worked for me was that I figured out that since a recent update my gpu was activated again by new drivers nova_core which are intended to supersede nouveau, whereas I had previously blacklisted nouveau to avoid using the nvidia gpu exactly because of its power consumption. Changing this through the command below made all the difference. I can do this because my laptop also has Intel integrated graphics.

sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args='rd.driver.blacklist=nova_core modprobe.blacklist=nova_core'

This information I found on F42 - Updating to Kernel 6.15.3-200 breaks nvidia open source drivers - #5 by gnwiii

This changed reduced my power consumption from ± 30 W to ± 7 W, and much lower laptop temperatures overall.