I’ve been using opensuse for quite a while (and linux for maybe 10 years) and had no problems whatsoever with different computers. But now I just got a new laptop - MSI FX420-002US (i3-2310M, Intel HD3000+Radeon HD6470) and this is the first time when I can’t use linux normally… I really would like to keep using it, so asking here for your help.
I can leave without all those fancy buttons this laptop has, but I need some basic functionality, that is using graphic cards and normal battery life.
for whatever reason, fan is going on non-stop with much higher speed than it is doing in windows and this leads to 2 major issues:
noise
and what is more important, it drains battery so I cannot get more than 2 hours of battery life compared to >4hrs in Windows. Don’t know if this is of help, but when I run sensors it returns me 3 readings: temp1, temp2 and temp3 with first 2 being around 30C and 3rd one is ~70C (while on windows CPU-Z gives me core temperatures of 40-50C for both cores) - maybe this forces fan to speedup?
I installed openSUSE 11.4 and it started correctly, using only intel videocard. I can’t make Radeon HD6470 work - radeon driver doesn’t support this chip and proprietory fglrx gave me something like “cannot load driver - your chipset is not supported”. The same actually happened in Windows: I couldn;t update driver with the same error. Is it possible to use switchable graphics at all?
I would really appreciate if you could help me with those 2 issues!
On 2011-05-09 01:06, sealex wrote:
> 2) and what is more important, it drains battery so I cannot get
> more than 2 hours of battery life compared to >4hrs in Windows. Don’t
> know if this is of help, but when I run sensors it returns me 3
> readings: temp1, temp2 and temp3 with first 2 being around 30C and 3rd
> one is ~70C (while on windows CPU-Z gives me core temperatures of 40-50C
> for both cores) - maybe this forces fan to speedup?
My guess is that temp1 and 2 are the two cores of the cpu, lower than in
windows. I don’t know what is the other one. Video? Disk?
Yes, a warm temperature means that something is warming it up (using
electricity to do it), and that the fan has to turn faster to compensate.
Both things means shorter battery life.
Find out what the third sensor is for.
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Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
CPU Speed control exists now only in YaST and can have a big impact on power usage and heat generation. Why not do the following, open:
YaST / Software / Software Management, search on Power and install yast2-power-management. Once done, restart YaST.
Next:
YaST / System / System Services (Runlevel), select Expert Mode Bullet at the top left:
Now:
Find and highlight pm-profiler and then select the button on the bottom right and Enable the pm-profile Service and answer yes to the added services requested.
Next:
Select the button on the bottom left and Start the pm-profiler Servrce. You should get a good start with a 0 error return code.
Now select the finish button on the bottom right and allow your selections to be saved.
Now:
YaST / System / Power Management. You can select from three choices with Power Saving doing what I think you are looking for. It is also possible to upgrade the kernel from 2.6.37 to 2.6.38 which might help even more, if interested.
Thank you James! Didn’t think about this option. Made those changes - will see how it goes. Fan is still going fast though… Is there a way to change profiles quicker? I mean not going into YaST?
Thank you James! Didn’t think about this option. Made those changes - will see how it goes. Fan is still going fast though… Is there a way to change profiles quicker? I mean not going into YaST?
Thanks,
Did you select Powersaving to see if that helps? I do not know of a faster way to run this function, but I will check around to see if this can be run directly.
I don’t have any experience in this myself, but according to Phoronix there were 2 major regressions in the Linux kernel impacting battery life.
The change from the 2.6.37 to 2.6.38 kernel purportedly had an impact on power management, resulting in an average of 5 to 10% reduced battery life. The earlier change from the 2.6.34 to 2.6.35 kernel had an even larger negative effect on power management and battery life. … I can’t comment on additional features those kernel updates may or may not have provided, but the view of the engineers at Phoronix is upgrading the kernel thus far has had the opposite effect on battery life.
I started a thread about this subject (which contains the references) here: Possible Power Management regressions in recent Linux kernels ? … Please don’t ‘shoot the messenger’ … I’m only posting the above to note there are different views re: kernel upgrades for improved power management.
Does that laptop have 2 hybrid graphic devices ? If so and if openSUSE is working well, then you are one of the few who seem to be doing well with a hybrid graphic device combination.
There are a number of users on our forum who have complained about problems with hybrid graphic device setup, and thus far the help threads to assist these users provide no indication of satisfactory resolution in helping these users with their laptop graphics.
If your laptop has hybrid graphics, and if you had to do anything special, and if you succeeded, I for one would be MOST interested in learning your technique(s). Thanks in advance for any tidbits you can pass on.
Yes, I did select that. So far not a significant improvement - 2 hrs 30 min vs 4 hrs 20 min according to power-management systems on openSUSE and Windows respectively. 50% of battery was used in a little bit more than 1 hr while on openSUSE (mainly browsing), then I rebooted into windows and worked for almost 3 more hours (watching video)…
I don’t have any experience in this myself, but according to Phoronix there were 2 major regressions in the Linux kernel impacting battery life.
The change from the 2.6.37 to 2.6.38 kernel purportedly had an impact on power management, resulting in an average of 5 to 10% reduced battery life. The earlier change from the 2.6.34 to 2.6.35 kernel had an even larger negative effect on power management and battery life. … I can’t comment on additional features those kernel updates may or may not have provided, but the view of the engineers at Phoronix is upgrading the kernel thus far has had the opposite effect on battery life.
I started a thread about this subject (which contains the references) here: Possible Power Management regressions in recent Linux kernels ? … Please don’t ‘shoot the messenger’ … I’m only posting the above to note there are different views re: kernel upgrades for improved power management.
that’s a bummer… Anyway, thank you, I’ll to look there to find out if there are any options available.
yes. it has hybrid graphics. I assume my luck was in that Radein HD6470 was not supported by open-source radeon driver, so openSUSE automatically fell onto intel driver for Sandybridge. After I installed fglrx (building package from installer myself) there still was only intel driver working; fglrx was loaded though. ATI Catalyst Center wouldn’t start, referring to card being not supported (really weird, but as I mentioned before, I tried to install latest driver form ATI on Windows and it wouldn’t start either, could only use driver provided by MSI - maybe some hardware modifications made it impossible to load regular ATI driver?) . This led to failure of compiz to work (KDE had its desktop effects BTW), so I had to blacklist fglrx and uninstall it, after that compiz came back. And now I have a working system using Sangybridge only; no way to use Radeon HD6470, but it still a working solution for me, although sort of a misuse of available system
Many thanks for sharing your experience here. There is an ongoing thread here on hybrid graphics: Hybrid Graphics driver help needed but unfortunately there are no solutions for the users in that thread.
Regarding power saving related problems: I have a Sony VAIO FW laptop with Windows and OpenSUSE. When using OpenSUSE fan spins on high RPM all the time and the battery drains fast.
On 2011-05-11 11:36, sammykmet wrote:
>
> Regarding power saving related problems: I have a Sony VAIO FW laptop
> with Windows and OpenSUSE. When using OpenSUSE fan spins on high RPM all
> the time and the battery drains fast.
Have you installed laptop-mode-tools?
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
that’s actually looks really promising. Just looked into laptop_mode.conf and there you can control almost every option that is controlled by windows power management. I’m going to try that and will report later
ok, so I played with laptop-mode for a while. It helped to increase a battery life a little bit ( I would say, 30-40min), but still far behind the performance under windows. My best guess is that the main difference is how fan speed is controlled - it is noticeably louder under opensuse (well, it seems that CPU is much cooler under linux as well - it runs around 30C while on windows it is consistently over 40C), so I assume that’s the only reason for higher power drain. But I have no idea how to change that.
Did you check with the powertop command (when running on battery) if it
gives you some usefull information? If you do not have it installed the
package name is simply powertop.
–
PC: oS 11.3 64 bit | Intel Core2 Quad Q8300@2.50GHz | KDE 4.6.3 | GeForce
9600 GT | 4GB Ram
Eee PC 1201n: oS 11.4 64 bit | Intel Atom 330@1.60GHz | KDE 4.6.0 | nVidia
ION | 3GB Ram
On 2011-05-17 15:06, sealex wrote:
> (well, it seems that CPU is much cooler under linux as well - it runs
> around 30C while on windows it is consistently over 40C), so I assume
> that’s the only reason for higher power drain. But I have no idea how to
> change that.
Something in Linux must be adjusting the fan for that temperature, probably
because the temperature limits are set wrong. I have no idea where/how this
is done.
I would think of reporting this in Bugzilla.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
… I’m only posting the above to note there are different views re: kernel upgrades for improved power management.