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 <env252525@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 3:12 AM Polarian <polarian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Nicolas Strike
