[Tfug] battery life, power management and windows vs linux

[Paul Lemmons]

I was reading something the other day and ran across the link below. The 
current kernel runs "hot" all of the time; even when it is not busy. 
There is a project to make the kernel "tickless" so that if it is doing 
nothing it is really doing nothing. This appears to be directly related 
to improving battery life and helping keep laptops cool enough to 
actually have on your lap.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/7749

-------- Original Message  --------
Subject: [Tfug] battery life, power management and windows vs linux
From: "Jeremy D Rogers" <jdrogers at northwestern.edu>
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org>
Date: 03/20/2007 08:47 PM
> Well, I finally have my shiny new thinkpad t60 and I love it. Fantastic.
> <excuses> Unifortunately I will  need to use some windows-only optics
> software, so unlike my last laptop, I left windows installed on it and
> made it dual boot.</excuses>
>
> Now as I've been tweaking things over the past week, I noticed that
> the battery reports around 5 hours under windows and only 3.5 hours
> under linux. So begins my quest. I know many things can suck power, so
> I think I took care of all the usual culprits. Here is a list of what
> I have working in linux:
> - cpu freqency is scaling using ondemand governer (down to 1GHz from 2GHz)
> - disks are spinning down using laptop-mode
> - wireless radio and bluetooth are off (modules unlaoded and kill switch on)
>
> I did some reading up and I found out that the ati cards like my X1300
> require the binarry fglrx driver to control the GPU clock scaling.
> Pity I have can't use opensource, but it did help me get from 3.5 up
> to around 4 hours on battery:
> - gpu frequency scaled down and in low voltage mode
>
> Now I'm stuck. Things I've tried that haven't helped much:
> - unloaded usb modules
> - unloaded pcmcia/cardbus modules (or issued cardctl eject/suspend)
> - unloaded modules or tried physically removing unltrabay dvd drive
> - unloaded sound modules
>
> The ultrabay actually seemed to help a little, but overall none of the
> above gained much over 4 hours.
>
> I welcome any and all suggestions.
> JDR
>
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