I have an Asus N55SL laptop on which the battery can run almost 4h on Windows 7.
Until last week, I had 2h50-3h of battery autonomy with Ubuntu 16.04 and Linux 4.13. Something happened (updates or else) that makes now my battery last less than 1h30.
I have TLP configured to enable power management on the wifi card and USB suspend. The CPU driver used is Intel Pstate on powersave governor.
Opening powertop, all tunables are at Good except VM writeback timeout, but the network interfaces wlp3s0 (iwlwifi) and enp5s0 (atl1c) suck respectively 14 W and 6 W while the total power consumption of the system is 25 W. I also have a usb-device-8086-0189 draining 2 W, which appears to be the Bluetooth radio, while the bluetooth is turned off.
I remember a few weeks ago being able to run under 15 W of total power. What can be done/what could go wrong here ?
Best Answer
The problem came from a broken DKMS, as described here : High power consumption of eth0 | archlinux.org
DKMS being broken prevented
bbswitchmodule to correctly compile during the kernel update. Therefore, the Nvidia GPU was constantly turned ON and powertop poorly calibrated so it attributed the extra power loss wrongly to the network card.I had to purge and reinstall DKMS, bbswitch and Nvidia driver as described here : dkms does not automatically rebuild after kernel upgrade
Now I'm back at 13-14 W.