I dual boot between KDE Neon User Edition (16.04) and Windows 10 on my ASUS GL702VM gaming laptop. Being a gaming laptop with Nvidia GSYNC, the battery life is already poor. However, it seems that the battery life under Neon is about twice as poor as with Windows 10. I usually get about 4 hours or better of battery life under Windows 10. I get about 2 hours or less under Neon.

I don't know what is going on. I use my laptop primarily at school to access web based homework and lab simulations. I was forced to use Windows a lot for my first two semester, due to some special characters/coding in Microsoft Office. My battery would last most of the day. I just finished a summer course that didn't require me to boot into Windows, and I noticed that my battery wouldn't even last through a 2 hour tutoring session. I thought it was just a fluke, but this happened every day for the last month.

I'm currently running the 4.16.3 kernel, but the battery life is just as poor with the default 4.13 kernel. I also installed tlp, powertop, and cpufreq. According to powertop, my laptop has an average discharge rate of 25 W. The network interface (r8169) and /sbin/v86d eat through the most power (12.8 and 10.8 W respectively), but only for a short period of time. The laptop keyboard and external mouse eat through 5 and 7 W of power 100% of the time (even with the keyboard backlight off). The CPU is in powersave mode when on battery.

Any help getting this under control would be greatly appreciated. Also, why doesn't Neon come pre-configured with laptop powersaving and monitoring tools?

Not positive, but when I was looking at power savings tools for my laptop (no dedicated gpu), I think I read that using tlp and powertop together can actually make things worse. In my case it did, but also my battery life was about the same when not using either, and not significantly different than Windows 10 (though I barely ever boot to that).

It might be worth looking at Nvidia-specific power saving settings, or using the non-Nvidia card if it is a dual graphics system - Prime/bbswitch/bumblebee etc

claydoh wrote:Not positive, but when I was looking at power savings tools for my laptop (no dedicated gpu), I think I read that using tlp and powertop together can actually make things worse. In my case it did, but also my battery life was about the same when not using either, and not significantly different than Windows 10 (though I barely ever boot to that).

It might be worth looking at Nvidia-specific power saving settings, or using the non-Nvidia card if it is a dual graphics system - Prime/bbswitch/bumblebee etc

Thanks for the reply!

If I can't use both powertop and tlp together, which one do you suggest I keep (tlp or powertop)?

Also, I can't use Bumblebee on this laptop. Only laptops with Optimus can use Bumblebee. My laptop has G-SYNC, so there is no non-Nvidia card. It always run the dGPU and there is no way to switch to the Intel GPU (which is disabled via hardware). I chose G-SYNC for the better frame rates, so I knew what I was getting into.

If the battery life in Neon was even remotely close to what I am getting under Windows 10, I would not have started this thread. However, like I mentioned before -- I'm only getting about a half of the battery life under Neon that I am getting under Windows 10.

The only way is to experiment and investigate, especially with the GPU power savings. This is not a Neon specific issue, so there will be many different thing to try out, unfortunately, unless you find someone with the same system, or very similar one, and they share their own experiences.

I would suggest focusing on the gpu/driver side of things, as in my own somewhat limited experiences, the cpu, kernel, etc are already fairly well sorted out. The big drain is that sweet video card, so that's a good place to begin.

This is not for Ubuntu but the basis are there for things to try:
https://devzone.channeladam.com/noteboo ... ings-modes

claydoh wrote:The only way is to experiment and investigate, especially with the GPU power savings. This is not a Neon specific issue, so there will be many different thing to try out, unfortunately, unless you find someone with the same system, or very similar one, and they share their own experiences.

I would suggest focusing on the gpu/driver side of things, as in my own somewhat limited experiences, the cpu, kernel, etc are already fairly well sorted out. The big drain is that sweet video card, so that's a good place to begin.

This is not for Ubuntu but the basis are there for things to try:
https://devzone.channeladam.com/noteboo ... ings-modes

Thanks for the link at the end. Set my graphics card to run in powermiser when on AC power.

One other question: what the heck is /sbin/v86d? I googled it, but can't get a definite answer. It is eating up about 12 watts of battery power. If I don't need it, would love to shut it down.

Ok, I was able to add almost 1 1/2 hours of battery life to my GL702VM by making some very simple adjustments.

First, I removed the v86d package. It seems that it is only needed for running a live-CD. Removing it gave me almost an hour of extra battery life.

Second, I disabled my Ethernet port. For some reason the Ethernet port eats up about 12W of power even if no cable is attached and the laptop is on Wifi. It's strange because the Wifi adapter eats up a lot less power (around 22 mW) when it is being used, yet the Ethernet port eats up about 545 times as much power when it is not being used! I had to add this line "sudo ifconfig enp3s0 down" to /etc/rc.local. Since I hardly ever use Ethernet (only once in the last year) it makes no since to have the port on and eating up some much battery power.

Finally, I made sure that PowerMizer was on for my Nvidia card by following the instructions in the link that claydoh provided (https://devzone.channeladam.com/noteboo ... ings-modes).

These tweaks my discharge rate was cut in half (to 12.5W on average vs 25W). The time remaining jumped from a 1 hour 49 minute average at 90% to a 2 hour 49 minute average at 90%. I have actually seen it read as high as 3 hours and 30 minutes (when Chrome is not running)!

A few suggestions for the Neon team:

-If v86d is only needed for Live-CDs/USBs, why not have it automatically remove itself once Neon is installed on the system?
-Why not have PowerMizer activated by default when the proprietary Nvidia driver is installed?

Also, why does the Ethernet port eat up so much power when it is not in use?

k4ever wrote:A few suggestions for the Neon team:

-If v86d is only needed for Live-CDs/USBs, why not have it automatically remove itself once Neon is installed on the system?

I do not know, but this would likely be a *buntu thing, as drivers and the installation process are not touched by Neon. it is not installed on my Neon systems, though I have one older Nvidia powered laptop I have not checked. My Kubuntu/Nvidia PC does not have it installed, either.

-Why not have PowerMizer activated by default when the proprietary Nvidia driver is installed?

Another Ubuntu question perhaps or rather an Nvidia one, but does any distro enable this? I will guess that it isn't as it is not needed by everyone, and this is probably something the driver should provide or configure itself - the downside of not having access to the code to allow kernel developers to create the software for the kernel to detect and set it up.

claydoh wrote:

k4ever wrote:A few suggestions for the Neon team:

-If v86d is only needed for Live-CDs/USBs, why not have it automatically remove itself once Neon is installed on the system?

I do not know, but this would likely be a *buntu thing, as drivers and the installation process are not touched by Neon. it is not installed on my Neon systems, though I have one older Nvidia powered laptop I have not checked. My Kubuntu/Nvidia PC does not have it installed, either.

-Why not have PowerMizer activated by default when the proprietary Nvidia driver is installed?

Another Ubuntu question perhaps or rather an Nvidia one, but does any distro enable this? I will guess that it isn't as it is not needed by everyone, and this is probably something the driver should provide or configure itself - the downside of not having access to the code to allow kernel developers to create the software for the kernel to detect and set it up.

I can't speak for (or to) other distros, just the one I'm using now (Neon). I would think that the Neon team would be able to make some minor tweaks to the Ubuntu base...

k4ever wrote:I can't speak for (or to) other distros, just the one I'm using now (Neon). I would think that the Neon team would be able to make some minor tweaks to the Ubuntu base...

Not likely, as anything not specifically Plasma and Qt related is out of Neon's scope. Drivers are not something Neon (a non-distro distro) can or wants to provide support for.
I would assume that if it were possible, Ubuntu or any other distro would already do so.

Me, I blame Nvidia

claydoh wrote:

k4ever wrote:I can't speak for (or to) other distros, just the one I'm using now (Neon). I would think that the Neon team would be able to make some minor tweaks to the Ubuntu base...

Not likely, as anything not specifically Plasma and Qt related is out of Neon's scope. Drivers are not something Neon (a non-distro distro) can or wants to provide support for.
I would assume that if it were possible, Ubuntu or any other distro would already do so.

Me, I blame Nvidia

Honestly, I understand that Neon is not a "distro." However, it is seen as one by a lot of people, including the Neon team. If not, why have we not gotten 18.04 yet, even though Plasma 5.13 works well with it (cough, cough, Kubuntu 18.04)? My understanding is that the Neon team is putting some effort into making sure everything works right with the release and that the upgrade path from 16.04 is solid. Although they don't want to say it publicly, their actions speak distro to everyone else... even if it is a distro lite. I can honestly say this, even with the little bit of effort that the Neon team puts into their not distro, Neon is by far the best KDE distro I have used in a long time. Way better than KDE ever was on Linux Mint or Kubuntu, or even OpenSUSE.

That being said, Nvidia driver settings were not my main power draw. It only accounted for about 5% of "wasted" power, and I can justify its use -- love the high frame rates when playing graphics intensive games. Vb86 and the active Ethernet port (with no cord attached) accounted for a whopping 90% of the wasted power, with nothing to show for it. Vb86 was just there. I don't know if I may have installed it as a dependency to something that eventually got uninstalled, or if it was just a remnant of using the live-CD. Either way it was totally not needed. The active Ethernet port was all Neon/Ubuntu specific. I really wish there was an option in Plasma to turn off the port when not in use.

I'm definitely not hating. I love Neon and I am glad that this issue was easily fixed. I just wanted to let the Neon team and other Neon users know what it took so this doesn't happen to anyone else again in the future.