Powersave CPU governor instead of performance

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21

Hi Arjan.

I should have written “there is no a ‘massive’ active forum”, as powerful as CL is as a distro, sorry ;)! Hope it sound better for you!

I know the native politic with power management (powersave by defaut on laptop, no UI to change this, etc), this is why some folks are searching for tips to improve this or personalize it.

For example i’d like to know if somebody has tried to modify clr-power-tweaks.conf : the man page just give few examples (and the path /etc/clr-power-tweaks.conf seems to have changed) :

https://www.clearlinux.org/clear-linux-documentation/reference/manpages/clr-power-tweaks.conf.5.html

22

AMD Threadripper system also impacted.

Recently, I switched to CachyOS. It consumes lower power consumption at idle, greater than 13 watts savings. I tracked this down. The Clear patch 0125 is the main reason and disabled in the ClearMod project along with 0160.

# Patch0125: 0125-nvme-workaround.patch not applied due to idle +13 watts
# Patch0160: better_idle_balance.patch also more idle watts for no gain

Right now, the Clear 6.12 kernel (ditto for prior 6.11 native) consumes 146 watts at idle. This is higher from what I recall. The ClearMod kernel on Clear is significantly less at 102 watts, same as CachyOS.

The repo includes two patches from CachyOS.

0003-linux6.11-amd-pstate.patch
0007-linux6.11-intel-pstate.patch

I run with cpufreq.default_governor=ondemand kernel option.

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I’ll be happy to drop 125 – that was just there as a workaroudn that made a bunch of (AMD) systems not boot. but if it’s aweful on power it’s time to revisit

the better_idle one is mostly for scalability but shouldn’t impact idle power

1 Like
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Hello, and thanks @marioroy for your investigations!

@arjan Do we have to wait for an update to have these patches disabled? Thanks :slight_smile:

Right now CL is using about 12 watts just when browsing internet, editing some odt files and with screen brightness leveled to 12%.

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this should be out already

so next step is powertop or turbostat output to see what is not going well on your system

26

Hi @arjan and thanks for your suggest

You’re right: there is a (documented but unsolved) trouble on my Asus Zenbook with the touchpad. The driver is causing thousands of interrupts, on different CPU cores, causing a high amount of watt usage.

Modules concerned are idma64 & i2c_designware_pci :
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218169

I ran a lot of fixes but the trouble persists :slightly_frowning_face:: unloading modules, blacklisting them, binding them, etc., testing so many settings for the touchpad. The only thing I didn’t do is replace these drivers with others.

I think I should go back to Fedora: I tested the 41 ISO yesterday, and on live it seems that this trouble does not appear. What a pity!