Energy consumption high

English Hardware
1

Sirs,

I recently installed OpenSuSe 15.2 in a dual boot configuration on a Gigabyte Aero laptop. I have noticed that my power consumption has increased greatly from 15.1 and is at least double what it is in windows. (Battery life is 5hr in windows 2hr in 15.2.) I have made sure that power management is on, and that my screen is dimmed when on battery. Are there any other power management settings I have missed? I have checked “Energy Information” in “KInfocenter” and 15.2 is reporting 45-50 Watts. 15.1 used to report ~25 Watts. I am not seeing a lot of CPU activity, but I can definitely feel that the laptop is warm. (Gkrelm shows slightly high CPU temperatures, 49C.)

Thanks for any input that you may have.

Kapt

2

Is there an Nvidia GPU on that laptop? Maybe it is not switched off when not in use? Did you install proprietary Nvidia drivers and how?

3

Orso,

It does have an NVIDA card. I am not using it yet. I was going to try BumbleBee, but I understand 15.2 has easier options. Should I start by installing the NVIDIA drivers? What is the recommended way? I usually just add the Repos in YAST and install away.

Thanks,
Kapt

4

Orso,

Sorry, about the silly questions, I did a little reading and the NVIDA install is very easy now. It looks like that was my issue. Thank you very much for the answer. It also looks like I can activate the NVIDIA card with “DRI_PRIME=1”.

It seems to work, but I get a message:


libGL error: MESA-LOADER: failed to open nouveau (search paths /usr/lib64/dri)
libGL error: failed to load driver: nouveau

I will search the forum to see if there is an answer.

Thanks again for the help.
Kapt

5

So your laptop is of the “Optimus” kind. DRI_PRIME should work out of the box with the default install, but if you already installed the Nvidia drivers you are no more using the open source drivers and you get that error.
You need suse-prime to switch GPU with the Nvidia drivers installed, please see: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_SUSE_Prime
Please read the warning about powering off the Nvidia GPU, which points here https://github.com/openSUSE/SUSEPrime#nvidia-power-off-support-since-435xxx-driver-with-turing-gpu-and-later-g05-driver-packages
If you need help, please be more specific about what you actually did, what guide you followed and what you get from the system, posting system output including the command, the output and the trailing prompt (we cannot browse over your shoulder).