Poor Battery Life on KDE

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
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The battery reports a discharge rate of 8.09 W
The energy consumed was 0.00 J
The estimated remaining time is 1 hours, 47 minutes
Summary: 4771,9 wakeups/second, 0,0 GPU ops/seconds, 0,0 VFS ops/sec and 56,6% CPU use
Usage Events/s Category Description
5,6 ms/s 2400,3 Interrupt [40] idma64.1
13,0 ms/s 1402,0 Timer tick_nohz_handler
126,6 ms/s 91,3 Process [PID 886] /usr/bin/kwin_wayland--wayland-fd 7 --socket
1,5 ms/s 127,8 kWork engine_retire
156,9 ms/s 50,0 Process [PID 1578] /usr/lib/firefox/firefox
3,3 ms/s 105,7 Interrupt [0] HI_SOFTIRQ
139,0 ms/s 27,9 Process [PID 7895] /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -isFor
2,3 ms/s 66,3 Interrupt [176] i915
10,0 ms/s 54,8 Interrupt [7] sched(softirq)
249,8 µs/s 57,7 kWork rps_work
291,3 µs/s 54,8 Timer inactive_task_timer
17,9 ms/s 41,3 Interrupt [14] INTC1056:00
679,5 µs/s 47,1 kWork intel_atomic_cleanup_work
0,0 µs/s 47,1 kWork intel_atomic_commit_work
1,2 ms/s 42,3 kWork __intel_wakeref_put_work
682,9 µs/s 30,7 Process [PID 19] [rcu_preempt]
8,5 ms/s 18,3 Process [PID 27833] powertop

This is the full page when I run powertop all processes fluctuate according to use except intel_atomic_cleanup_work and [PID 19] [rcu_preempt]

Both of these stay in the 600 to 500 µs/s mark. However, I don’t know if these are normal for these kinds of processes.

As for the tunables I have run –auto-tune and it seems to have helped without causing any interference with my usb devices.

Also my bad if the formatting is not the greatest.

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I installed the tool but most options are greyed out with it stating the driver is not loaded properly or hwmon directory not found.

I also installed all the dependencies and requirements listed on the github page, so maybe my “Essential” model is not supported?

Regarding the BIOS I will try to update it as soon as possible.

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Have you installed those packages ?

sudo pacman -S linux-headers base-devel lm_sensors git dmidecode python-pyqt6 python-yaml python-argcomplete python-darkdetect

Generally I‘ld say that the DKMS version would be a bit more practical, as I won’t require rebuilding and reinstalling the drivers after each new kernel update.

But, as note in my previous comment, the current package in the AUR mentions that this may only work on CachyOS currently.

Check the section on initial usage testing section as well, as there are useful troubleshooting information to check if the package works as intended.

In short: I would expect that it will take some time to get into this, which isn’t simply done within a few minutes. Be patient, take your time.

In addition to that, not related to the lenovo legion package, you could also check if battery conservation mode is supported / activated on your machine.

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It’s not the issue that it is an “essential” model. It’s more likely related to the fact that it is using a i5-12450HX CPU. And lenovo doesn’t provide linux support officially for that gaming line of laptops and it’s hardware features.

As you’re using the LTS kernel, it shouldn’t be a problem I assume, as that architecture has been around for a while already. there are other kernel options which may work better in combination with this hardware, I prefer the zen kernel for instance.

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Yes, I’ve installed those packages before installing the tool, but it still displays the same message.

I’ve also checked if battery conservation mode is activated and it is, I had limited the charge to 80% through plasma settings before making this thread, if that’s anything to go off of.

I still need to take a look at the initial usage testing for the lenovolegionlinux app, right now I am bit a short on time for that.

But, I am not too worried about this taking a while to fix, learning new things and enjoying the ride is part of the process :smiley:

One more thing, I am noticing an improvement on battery life from the powertop settings, is there a way to make it apply those settings every time the laptop is running on battery?

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Yes, you will find it in the link of my 1st answer…

I’m using the systemd-unit from this article, works very well here. They preferred the other way, it’s up to you.

Your log I have to read once more, but the 1st look did not see so much bad things.

I suspect your kde is very hungry and you do some video or gaming?

Then (with running video or whatever) you should run the powertop again - surprise, surprise :wink:

And - do you check (assumed you play some video etc.) if the HW-acceleration is used?

Just struggling the same problem here…

Edit: I use it if battery or not, but there should be some way to select it.

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If I am not mistaken I was running a video on the background when I sent you that log and as I previously mentioned I checked if Firefox is running with hardware acceleration and it is working as intended. (I checked through the about:support page)

That’s what I am trying to understand, why is it so power hungry even with all the power saving measures?

I’ll try to make powertop run with auto-tune while on a full charge to see if I can notice any major improvements.

28

Don’t forget to do a calibration run for exact measurements / adequate estimates of the power consumption.

29

Already ran that before using –auto-tune and yeah with powertop I am able to get 2-3 hours of battery with an 80% charge, which is pretty much as advertised.

Now I just to make run while on battery and stop while on AC.

Also, do I need to run –calibrate more than once?

30

I think, I should point you to a further point of joy :wink:

GPU-use - make sure, your gpu uses its hw-decoding etc. The Arch-wiki has a whole series of articles therefor. If your cpu has all decoding to do in software, the bat-drain is huge.

But I don’t have Lenovo, Nvidia or kde here…

If you changed something, you should check it / compare it with your powertop.

P.S. -calibrate, I think, is neccesary only at the beginning, to have a base for comparing the next samples, but - RTFM :wink:

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Personally, I won’t bother to make these differentiation between battery mode and ac power within powertop. And you won’t need an additional calibration run.

I’m using powertop on an all AMD desktop system. To achieve very low power consumption / energy efficiency during idle.

And via AMD pstate epp governor in active mode, my system boots into power savings and I only switch to performance when required (e.g. compilatiion job or gaming). But the pstate epp won’t work for your system as it is exclusive for AMD microcode, Zen 3 and later.

Therefore, as I don’t have any first hands experience with the power profiles for Intel CPUs, as well as power profiles for NVIDIA GPUs, I can’t really provide directions. At least CPU wise, turbo clock speeds could be deactivated via x86_energy_perf_policy, it definitely makes sense to check which cpu frequency scaling governor would work best for your Core i5-12450HX. Check power-profiles-daemon and the related articles.

Take a look at power management section of the Lenovo Ideapad Slim 3 16ABR8, which is based on the Core i5 12450H CPU. Additionally, cat /sys/firmware/acpi/platform_profile should reveal if firmware based power modes are implemented for your model. Those should affect not only the CPU, but the GPU settings as well. More on that, here.

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Alright, thank you very much for this tip. I’ll be away from my pc for today, but I’ll make sure to check this out as soon as I’m back.

33

Just took a very quick look at cat /sys/firmware/acpi/platform_profile and it says “No such file or directory”, it seems they are not implemented for my model or something went wrong during setup.

For the other things you’ve sent me I’ll be away from my pc today so I’m going to check them as soon as I get back.

I’ll also read more on that page about the Ideapad when I return.

34

After running the laptop some more with powertop –auto-tune my laptop can last up to three and a half hours while browsing the web or watching videos. I must say, I’m pretty satisfied with these results.

Now, I am going to mark this as the solution for anyone else that stumbles through this post looking for answers. However, I need to point out that if you need some extra juice on your laptop it’s a good idea to configure hardware acceleration through this link here, just look for your hardware combination and follow the instructions.

Although, there’s one more thing I need to point out, on newer Nvidia cards using the package libva-nvidia-driver might cause a higher power drain, so depending on your case it might be wiser to just stick to Intel IGPU.

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