Linux – How to improve battery life in Fedora 15

acpifedoragnome3linuxpower-management

I am seeing a horrible battery life with Fedora 15 (lovelock) with Gnome Shell 3 on my laptop. I keep the screen brightness, back light pretty low. I still get about 1 hr 50 minutes battery life out of it after a full charge while just browsing. I also got a brand new battery from lenovo but no luck.

I tried the workaround mentioned here — booting with pcie_aspm=force — but that did not help any.

It is a Lenovo T420s with a 6 cell battery. The kernel version is 2.6.40-4.fc15.x86_64 and CPU is Intel® Core™ i5-2540M CPU @ 2.60GHz. Kernel config can be found here.

Is this pretty much what everyone else is seeing? Is it something with Fedora 15? Should I downgrade to Fedora 14? Are there any specific packages I can remove to make the battery life better?

I think I should be able to get around 3 to 4 hours with a 6 cell battery – less than 2 hours sounds very low.

Here are paste bin links to power top wakeup stats and tunables stats.

FYI – I found this link to be an excellent source for tips on reducing power usage. I am going to follow some of the advices posted there.

Best Answer

The program powertop should help you identify the problem.

   $ sudo yum -y install powertop
   $ sudo powertop

Look at the various output, and then arrow-key over to the rightmost "tab", Tunables. Look at the things which are "bad", and press enter to fix them.

Also, on the first Overview screen, look for any egregiously bad processes that might be causing wake-ups.

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