The Idle Power Use Of The Past 19 Linux Kernel Releases

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Idle Power Use Of The Past 19 Linux Kernel Releases

This morning I published the Power Consumption and Efficiency Of The Linux Kernel For The Last Three Years article containing power consumption data for an Intel Haswell system going back to the Linux 3.11 kernel through Linux 4.9 Git. Those were some interesting power consumption numbers under load while here are the idle numbers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-19-Idle-Power-Draw

[ElectricPrism]

This is pretty cool to see how things have progressed for better or worse. I like long term data comparisons

[tehabe]

I actually have the problem with my Skylake Core m 6Y30 that it can't idle after booting, the interrupt idma64.0 is preventing this for some unknown reason. It keeps the processor at 2 GHz. After I suspended the computer and wake it up again, everything is fine and my Skylake can idle. And than I can reach about 8-9 hours on battery. Which is really nice I think.

[Zan Lynx]

Where I have recently seen some great power use improvements is with Intel graphics and PSR (Panel Self Refresh) on laptops. I haven't checked if this works in X.org but with Wayland it is great.

I'm on Fedora 25. I think kernel 4.7 had PSR but it was buggy. It seems to work much better in 4.8 (except my external monitors still flicker with it on).

Anyway, my Dell m3800 went from 16W usage while web browsing at 50% brightness to just 10W, as reported by gnome-power-statistics while on battery.

Note that if anything is running that continues to update the screen PSR won't kick on. So Gnome System Monitor or glxgears or animated GIFs update so often that PSR doesn't kick in.

[torsionbar28]

I assume these power benchmarks are with stock out of the box default settings? I recently discovered powertop, and after setting a few of the tuneables in there, was able to achieve major battery life gains on my dell laptop.