2 issues; Power consumption almost 2x that of 13.04 and Intel 6205 wifi card issues

[Rookie1337]

Hi,

Wondering if someone could help me figure out what is causing my laptop to burn through it's battery in 13.10 at twice the rate it was going in 13.04 when all other settings have been equal between the two. Would this have to do with some kernel regression? Did the 3.11 kernel ship with the intel pstate driver? Also, would using something like the acpi CPU driver cause this issue? How would one go about checking and fixing this?

Next issue, I have a Intel 6205 wifi card that is dropping any secured (WPA, WEP, ect.) WIFI connections after an amount of time ranging from 20-40 minutes regardless of being on battery or AC power. Can anyone help with fixing that issue?

Thanks in advance.

[SteveRiley]

Install powertop and observe the "Idle stats" tab. Your cores should be sleeping in C7 for over 90% of the time. What do you observe?

What are your current kernel boot parameters? Try adding idle=mwait and see if that makes a difference.

[Rookie1337]

Instead of telling you is it OK if I attach screens of the 2 state related tabs from powertop? Here they are




You're talking about my /etc/default/grub settings right? I just want to make sure there aren't other places to pass parameters.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"
I'll add idle=mwait and see what happens but...which aspect is that supposed to help..the power consumption or the wifi card?

And again, thanks Steve you've been really helpful so far.

[SteveRiley]

Those screenshots look fine.

It appears that a power regression has snunk into the kernel, starting with 3.10 (info, more info). Adding idle=mwait is reported to help. Also, you should remove the acpi_osi=Linux parameter. Some especially buggy firmwares will shut down features if they detect Linux is booting; without that parameter, Linux fakes itself as Windows to the firmware so that all features remain available.

I don't have any immediate ideas about the problem with your wireless, maybe Google might Two questions: you mention secure connections get dropped; do open connections also get dropped? Does anything appear in the syslog when the connection drops?

[Rookie1337]

Those screenshots look fine.

It appears that a power regression has snunk into the kernel, starting with 3.10 (info, more info). Adding idle=mwait is reported to help. Also, you should remove the acpi_osi=Linux parameter. Some especially buggy firmwares will shut down features if they detect Linux is booting; without that parameter, Linux fakes itself as Windows to the firmware so that all features remain available.

I don't have any immediate ideas about the problem with your wireless, maybe Google might Two questions: you mention secure connections get dropped; do open connections also get dropped? Does anything appear in the syslog when the connection drops?

I'll have to try the wireless issues out again later.

As for the power issues...well I think the idle=mwait thing helped a little I seem to have about a 1Watt drop in power usage according to powertop. But, taking out the acpi_osi=Linux thing just disabled my function key control over my backlight...does it really effect power consumption?

[SteveRiley]

I used to run with acpi_osi=Linux until I read a bit more about how the kernel now intentionally lies when the firmware asks "Hey, what operating system are you?" The kernel pretends to be Windows so that the firmware will keep all of its features enabled.

However, upon further investigation just now, I've noticed a number of reports where acpi_osi=Linux is in fact required to get the brightness controls to work on some laptops. So in your case, you'll need to keep it. It has nothing to do with power consumption, BTW.

[Rookie1337]

Alright. Thanks so far Steve.

I'm wondering if for some reason using the sRGB color profile is causing the issue...the screen seems brighter at all settings with it enabled as opposed to when I used it under 13.04.

[SteveRiley]

That's an interesting observation. Not sure what to think about it...I haven't noticed any difference in the brightness on my T520 as I've moved from release to release.

[Snowhog]

...I've noticed a number of reports where acpi_osi=Linux is in fact required to get the brightness controls to work on some laptops. So in your case, you'll need to keep it. It has nothing to do with power consumption, BTW.

There are some other kernel options you can try instead.

noapic

or

acpi=noirq

I used to have to use one or the other of these to get my brightness keyboard controls to work.