I use bluefin since November 23. It’s awesome, everything is just perfect. But one thing is strange:
After switching to bluefin, my battery life went from 5-8 hours (idle 12 hours) down to 3-5 hours (idle 6 hours). I didn’t spend too much effort to find the culprit until recently as it didn’t bother me too much. Now I took the time to check what’s causing this:
My power draw is simply too high. My Laptop normally consumes 4.5 Watts of power (according to powertop, confirmed by some powermeter and the battery life). Now it is not going lower than 9 Watts.
Checking for what causes this I found two processes that caused some CPU spikes: gnome-software, display-link-manager. After removing gnome-software and disabling display-link.service, battery life is back to normal.
I didn’t find anything useful in the logs, at least after I searched the web for the entries I found everything seemed normal.
Any ideas if this will be improved in the future? I’m mostly concerned about gnome-software, I don’t like that I need to remove it to get my normal battery-life back. If I need it I can always start the display-link service so I wouldn’t bother leaving it disabled for now.
I also noticed that the fans of my laptop got activated even when I didn’t use the computer much. I’ve also checked htop and I’ve seen gnome-software at the top a couple of times. But plenty of times there was no clear culprit in htop.
I’m using the Framework bluefin image (with my intel Framework laptop) because I assume that this is the best possible power usage configuration. But it is surprising how frequently the fans start turning.
Yes, basically you have to watch very closely, at least on my machine. gnome-software will use the CPU only for a second, then go back to sleep. And then turns back on after a few seconds.
Regarding fans running, I had a similar issue with pop os after some recent updates. I had to set the power mode to balanced. If it’s set to performance, the fans run constantly. I’m using bluefin-dx with power mode also set to balanced, and I don’t think I’ve heard the fans running.
Thanks. But I have already set it to that mode.
stego are you on an amd framework or intel framework?
If you’re on the intel one the non framework images of bluefin have tuned instead of gnome power daemon, if you want to rebase to one of those and report back it might offer better performance. (I am finding that balanced does the trick for me)
If you’re on an amd image we’ll likely need to special case it to gnome power manager if it ends up better, but we need more data to make better decisions.
There’s not much we can do about gnome-software, it continues to be one of the worst UX parts, we’ve removed as much jank as we can from it but hopefully it’ll get better in Fedora 40?
The displaylink service we can probably do something about, if you disable it do you get a measurable difference in battery life? (I wonder if we can ondemand it)
Okay, I’m so stupid, now I wrote with another account that I wasn’t even aware of anymore… Sorry, I’m also Matthias_Bendewald, sorry for that
Good morning Jorge, thank you for your answer, I really appreciate that!
Yes, I just redid the measurement in my real life scenario. It might influence the measurements what else runs in the background, so the results will be different and maybe my case shouldn’t be taken to conclude how to precede for everyone…
However, it was a bit tricky to get precise measurements as the power draw goes up and down a bit all the time. But I did 2 repetitions with 10 measurements each over about 20 minutes and come to roughly the same values. I forgot how to calculate all those error bars and right now I’m too lazy to research that… My numbers:
Tool for measurement: powertop
Idle wighout displaymanager: 5.2W with 0.6W error
Idle with displaymanager: 7.3W with 0.8W error.
If this is of any interest, here’s my PC’s spec:
Host: 21EBCTO1WW ThinkPad E14 Gen 4
AMD Ryzen 7 5825U with Radeon Graphics (16) @ 400MHz
Kernel: 6.6.14-200.fc39.x86_64
Memory: 6974MiB / 38921MiB
Framework Intel 13" with ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin-framework:latest
I’ll rebase to ghcr.io/ublue-os/bluefin:latest for the next few days and see if that makes a difference.
Where in powertop can you see that?
On the very first page. It only shows on battery power without AC supply as it is measured by the battery. Though I’m not sure if every battery measures it and how accurate it is.
It was quite consistent to a okayish power-meter for the AC side in my case.
I have this as the top line on the first page:
Summary: 1427.9 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 68.4% CPU use
But that doesn’t really show me the power use, or does it?
Of course, it Shows how much Power IS drawn from the battery. That is exactly that
I still don’t understand. How do I get actual Watts like in your post above?
Idle wighout displaymanager: 5.2W with 0.6W error
Idle with displaymanager: 7.3W with 0.8W error.
This IS how it works on my Laptop:
https://www.tecmint.com/powertop-monitors-linux-laptop-battery-usage/
You can See the reported wattage in multiple Screenshots
Just for future reference: It looks like bluefin has switched to upowerd and powertop is no longer part of the image.
@j0rge Just want to report that I’ve also noticed gnome-software causing CPU spikes (while running in the background even after turning off automatic update checking). Killing it doesn’t help, it just comes back. Removing it: rpm-ostree override remove gnome-software - brings stats back down to a much more reasonable level. If I’ve used ujust to disable automatic updates, I should be fine as long as I remember to run the updater manually on a regular basis right? (which isn’t a problem for me to remember, it’s what I’ve been doing for the last decade or more).
Good to know, I don’t have an answer for you other than we should try to figure out the cause. Unfortunately we’re more sysadmins than we are developers.
We’ve tried to neuter gnome-software’s role on the desktop as much as we can, not out of spite of course, but as a way to remove the blast radius. It performs much better when you remove every responsibility except for flatpaks. This isn’t meant as a slam on gnome-software, it was designed for a time where people thought that “one grand software store will rule them all”.
If we were to do it all from scratch you’d have one lightweight store to handle only flatpaks and ignore the whole system stuff, but alas, reality. I don’t have an answer for you other than trying to do our best to give people the right tools to help.
We’ve recently introduced more performance tools into bluefin-dx: feat: add performance tools by castrojo · Pull Request #1667 · ublue-os/bluefin · GitHub Hopefully tools like sysprof will help our users help developers figure out how to improve the software.
If I won the lottery it’d be as “simple” as writing a brand new software store in rust/libadwaita that did all the business, but for now unfortunately the best we can offer is to try to help the gnome-software people the best that we can by filing issues with them, donating to GNOME, or whatever other crowd sourcing things we can muster.
Probably not the answer we wanna hear but the reality of the situation.
@j0rge I just want to know, from a “breakage” perspective, that the route I’ve chosen isn’t going to cause any problems.
- ujust → disable automatic updates
- confirm automatic updates and notifications are off in gnome-software
- rpm-ostree override remove gnome-software
- remember to run updater (ujust update or that handy big button in the app grid) manually on a regular basis
Yeah that should work.