Reduce Interrupts Radeon & Kernel

Hi

Was trying to increase the battery life on my laptop so fired up powertop. I noticed that the top interrupt is my radeon card, I have the default 12.1 radeon driver running.
Is there a way to reduce the radeon interrupts so I can increase my laptop life?

With the kernel is there anything that can be done here I found this post about creating a C.F.U CPU frequency utility but am not sure if its goal will assist me. I haven’t done much with kernels at this point. Link reference C.F.U. - CPU Frequency Utilitiy - Version 1.10 - For use with the cpufrequtils package - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

This was my powertop output.


Cn                Avg residency       P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running)        ( 0.3%)         2.27 Ghz     0.5%
polling           0.0ms ( 0.0%)         2.14 Ghz     0.0%
C1 mwait          0.4ms ( 0.0%)         2.00 Ghz     0.0%
C2 mwait          2.5ms ( 1.5%)         1.87 Ghz     0.0%
C3 mwait         10.9ms (98.2%)          933 Mhz    99.5%

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 96.4     interval: 15.0s
Power usage (ACPI estimate): 27.9W (1.2 hours)

Top causes for wakeups:
  41.1% ( 53.7)   [radeon] <interrupt>
  29.8% ( 38.9)   [Rescheduling interrupts] <kernel IPI>
   8.4% ( 11.0)   [brcmsmac] <interrupt>
   3.4% (  4.5)   [ahci] <interrupt>
   3.4% (  4.4)   kwin
   2.5% (  3.2)   plasma-desktop
   1.7% (  2.2)   mysqld
   1.5% (  2.0)   kworker/0:1
   0.9% (  1.2)   krunner
   0.9% (  1.1)   kworker/0:2
   0.8% (  1.0)   lancelot


Edited to include hardware information.

linux-t5t7:/home/Renshaw # lspci                              
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 02)                                              
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02)                                     
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset HECI Controller (rev 06)                   
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)               
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)                         
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05)                         
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 05)                         
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Madison [Radeon HD 5000M Series]
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc Redwood HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5600 Series]
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM57780 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43225 802.11b/g/n (rev 01)
ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 02)
ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 02)
ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 02)
ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 02)
ff:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)
ff:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)
linux-t5t7:/home/Renshaw # 

The proprietary AMD fglrx (catalyst) graphic driver is purported to be more battery power consumption efficient than the open source radeon driver (with purported superior power management). You could try install that driver.

There were a number of power regressions introduced into the GNU/Linux kernel during the 2.6.34 to 2.6.35 transition and during the 2.6.37 to 2.6.38 transition which I blogged about here: GNU/Linux and openSUSE power management regressions - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

The proprietary catalyst driver sure is a lot more efficient than the open source it took my battery life from 70-80 minutes up to 100-110 minutes on my hardware.

Would be interesting whether current Kernel drm drivers show same results. Can you please try it with drm-radeon-kmp-{flavor} from home:jobermayr.

How would I use home:jobermayr and is there a way to change back to my current kernel if I need to?

Use Kernel 3.1.9 from openSUSE:12.1:Update and drm-radeon-kmp-{flavor}…k3.1.9… from home:jobermayr. If it does not work just boot with ‘nomodeset’ and remove the drm package …

The officially updated Kernel should be safe.

Okay before installing I did a dup which included pulling in kde 4.8. I rechecked on full battery then and the battery was then lasting up to 2 hours with the fglrx driver.

I have installed your drm http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jobermayr/openSUSE_12.1/x86_64/drm-radeon-kmp-desktop-20120216.1835_k3.1.9_1.4-1.1.x86_64.rpm Now with the drm installed and it is reporting 1hr 55 mins but that may be due to me having firefox open to write this reply.