The main reason I switched to Arch a couple months ago was a) learning
linux systems, b) optimizing my laptops battery. Here's what I've done to
get my battery life from 1.5hrs on Windows to 9+ hrs on Arch (65Wh
capacity) with my Razer Blade 2021 (RTX 3070)
* Disable the GPU. This is the single most important step assuming you're
not gaming while on battery. I've tried a lot of different methods, the
only one that worked for my machine was Envy Control:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/envycontrol
This allows me to toggle my gpu off entirely, and if I want to game I'll
turn it back into hybrid/nvidia mode and then in the bios I'll enable the
dGPU only mode that my bios supports. It's a little clunky getting the GPU
back on, but it's the best solution I've found and still gives me more
control than Windows.
* Setup auto-cpufreq, this will automatically configure the cpu into
battery saving modes while on idle and performance modes when plugged in.
It works well out of the box, but you can configure it futher if you wish
such as disabling turbo mode and lowering max clock.
* Powertop --autotune. Powertop is great for both monitoring your power
consumption (I've got mine down to ~7W under light load, it was 15-25W on
windows), do note that in order to use anything other than the total system
power draw you need to run powertop's calibration. Also note that it may
cause some issues if you enable power saving on everything, e.g. if I run
auto-tune I have to go disable the power saving on my laptop's keyboard so
that I don't have to wake the keyboard up everytime I want to start typing.
These three things are really the meat of it. Best of luck
On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 3:44 AM eNV25
On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 3:12 AM Polarian
wrote: Hello,
So the ArchWiki can be very confusing about this all, and I am sure a lot of people will just install every package and will just hope that it does something, but I would like to actually understand it, so sorry for the ML noise, I would like some clarifications from those who are knowledgeable about this topic.
So reason I got a new Laptop with alder lake, and I am trying my best to optimise it, I dropped 70% battery in just 2 hours when its a 73wh battery, that is absurd, so I checked the two following which is recommended to improve performance and battery life:
1. 3D acceleration is in use 2. Hardware video acceleration is in use
As for 1, it was by default, however the ArchWiki on the xorg page (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#Driver_installation) lists the following driver to be installed for xorg:
xf86-video-intel
Actually, xf86-video-intel is not really recommended for most people: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics#Installation
Make sure Early KMS is enabled. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_mode_setting#Early_KMS_start
Now running glxinfo before the installing of said package, direct rendering is enabled (DRI), which would indicate that 3D acceleration is working as needed.
So I am a little confused on why it works without having the xorg driver installed? I have the xorg metapackage installed (I am lazy, and the xorg utilities are useful).
is xf86-video-intel used to enable DRI3? Is DRI2 possible without said driver?
The wiki is really not clear about this, and I know a lot of people probably wonder why it matters if 3D acceleration is already enabled, but I would like to know what is going on :)
Also, saying "Just use wayland" is not a valid answer, already had this happen before so just putting it out there.
I would appreciate a detailed explanation on what is going on to clear the confusion.
Now back to point 2, this was not enabled, VAAPI is the Intel API for hardware video acceleration and after installing the required driver (intel-media-driver) vainfo (from libva-utils) successfully shows support for Hardware video acceleration.
If anyone else has any suggestions or experience with optimising alder lake mobile chips on Arch Linux, I would also appreciate the pointers.
As a small note, I used AMD (ryzen 5 5500U) with my old laptop, I can not remember if I could be bothered to setup hardware video acceleration or going through optimising the integrated graphics, I ran that Arch Install for 2 years and typical me doesn't document any of my configuration or dotfiles, so I am trying to piece distant memories back together, lucky the ArchWiki is a good refresher :P
Thank you for your time, -- Polarian GPG signature: 0770E5312238C760 Website: https://polarian.dev JID/XMPP: polarian@polarian.dev
-- Nicolas Strike