MGA4: Poor battery life

[endat]

For some reason, when I am using mageia as my Primary Operating System, the battery on my laptop only lasts just over an hour, maybe 1.5 hours.. with other OS, I get at least 3 hours of battery life. Does anyone else see a reduced battery life when using Mageia? Are there any tips to getting normal battery life?

Please avoid obvious answers like:
- It's free, don't complain (because cost is not an issue, I have paid for Mandrake PowerPack, Widnows, other OS.. I dont care that it's free)
- What are you doing that uses so much battery? (because I use all OS the same way)
- You probably installed something that uses a lot without you knowing (No, because it was like this since default install, but now that I try to use it on the road, its very annoying)

It was like this in Mageia 3 too. How can I fix this?

[benmc]

Hi

Check to see if your cpu is running at full speed all the time.

if it is you may need to run as root

su -
urpmi cpupower
cpupower frequency-info

and then
" su -
cpupower frequency-set -g ondemand " to change it to " on demand ",

available cpufreq governors: ondemand, conservative, powersave, userspace, performance

[endat]

Cool program. It was already installed, so I ran the command to get frequency info

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[root@localhost endat]# cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 0:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 0
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 0
  maximum transition latency: 0.97 ms.
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 3.10 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance, powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 3.10 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency is 1.37 GHz (asserted by call to hardware).
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes
    25500 MHz max turbo 4 active cores
    25500 MHz max turbo 3 active cores
    25500 MHz max turbo 2 active cores
    25500 MHz max turbo 1 active cores


It's running at 1.37GHz out of 3.10GHz which isn't bad.. system monitor says there are 202 processes running, how many should there be at idle? Maybe there is a lot running that I don't necessarily neeeeeeeeeeeed

[doktor5000]

system monitor says there are 202 processes running, how many should there be at idle? Maybe there is a lot running that I don't necessarily neeeeeeeeeeeed

If you don't post what's running, nobody can tell. Best use

Code: Select all

ps faux

to get the output.

[Ken-Bergen]

That's just a snapshot of what frequency that core was running at that time.
If it's a multiple core processor try

Code: Select all

cpupower -c all frequency-info

several times. That will give you a better idea of what's happening.

[daniewicz]

Install and run powertop. This is a command line diagnostic tool to increase laptop battery life

powertop --html outputs command lines that you can add to add to rc.local to make powertop changes permanent

[doktor5000]

Just be aware that powertop will not ne able to fix things that are fundamentally wrong - like incorrect kernel boot options, broken BIOS or ACPI implementations and such things - and those are usually causing the most significant differences in battery life. powertop can surely optimize a few minutes or maybe even more out of a normal system, but it will not fix such huge issues like reported here.

It should still be tested, you're right there.

[daniewicz]

Just be aware that powertop will not be able to fix things that are fundamentally wrong - like incorrect kernel boot options, broken BIOS or ACPI implementations and such things

Fair enough.

I ran powertop on my MacBook Pro (dual boot Mageia 3 and OSX). Mageia battery life is now superior to that of OSX.