Atheros AR8152 with atl1c driver drains batteries of notebook.
 

I checked with "powertop". Right after booting the device consumes about 7 W (5 W when "wake up on lan" is activated). This gradually declines over the next hours(!) to about half that value and not without kicking the fan to high activity.

The driver is according to "ethtool -i eth0" the "atl1c version 1.0.1.0-NAPI". There is not even a cable in the jack. Any ideas how to reduce that comsumption to a sensible level?

I take it that your intention is to be working "offline" when you're seeing the problem. Do you have the wireless network activated at those times? I occasionally forget to turn it off when I'm working standalone and on battery power. (And I don't mean being disconnected from any wireless network access points; I mean disabling the wireless network adapter using the keyboard or via a physical slide switch on the case.) I found that battery lifetime is only about 1/3 of what I get when I have the wireless network disabled. It doesn't seem to be anything specific to Linux, either. My old Lenovo laptop running WinXP and the wife's Toshiba running Win7 drained the batteries quite quickly when the wireless adapter was turned on.

HTH...

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Rick

Hi Rick, you are absolutely right, concerning wlan. But this is not about wireless, it's the ethernet chip for the cable connection which is drawing that much power without even any cable in the socket. I had the wireless already disabled, as you suggest. Thanks for answering.

Ugh... I wonder: can you disable the network interface via the BIOS? And would that actually power down the interface or would it merely cause the system to not make the network interface visible to the OS? If that works, you'd have to remember to re-enable it next time you want to use a wired network connection. (Like I said: ugh!)

Good luck...

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Rick

No, I can't. This is on a silly little netbook which has as net-related choices in its BIOS-options solely "network boot enable/disable" and in the sequence of the boot media one can move the hard disk to the first place and the netboot down the line. But.

I found out how to do it in software:

This brings the power consumption of eth0 down to 0 mW, while, funny enough, wlan0 still uses 333 mW. Okay, in can live with that. I'll just do that command by hand when I use the netbook away from an AC power socket. I suppose I could do it with atomatic scripts but that is not really necessary.

Thanks for your input, Rick, solved.

<edit> I just noticed: When I remove the driver for wlan0 with "rmmod ath9k" and stop the network with "systemctl stop network", both devices show 0 Watts, i.e. zero power consumption for wlan0 and eth0. Nice. :) </edit>

Good to hear you got the solution.

I'm lazy enough that I'd be making an icon or setting up a panel button run a script to enable/disable those devices.

I'd find myself forgetting the syntax of the commands needed to deal with the power management which is why I'd be writing the script(s). :)

Hmm... I wonder if you couldn't set up or modify a power management profile to automagically disable the network when you're running on batteries.

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Rick

I'm playing too often as administrator ;). Also, this is the command syntax of systemd, the new init process and more, so a good reason to dip into that.

That's where I am way out of my depths. Have you done anything like this? How?

I completely understand your stance on doing things manually, especially while you're still learning about systemd. (Sun had me doing that when they changed the way services were managed on Solaris. I was tearing my hair out for a while.)

No... so far I've only tweaked battery charge level alarm thresholds.

If I were to need something like that (on my OpenSUSE/KDE-based laptop -- YMMV), I would go into "Configure Desktop -> Power Management -> Energy Saving Settings", go to the "On Battery" tab, and click on the "Run Script" checkbox to have the system run a script that implemented the command(s) to be to run to shutdown the network service. You could also go to the "On AC Power" tab and define another script to start the network service when you go back onto AC power. You'll probably need/want to check that the service is actually up or down before changing the state. I'm rather new to the systemd utility as well and not familiar enough with it to know what it will do if you start an already-running service. I wouldn't think it'd be a problem but I'd verify that before automating any change. (Maybe checking would, at least, let you keep keep extraneous messages out of the system logs.)

HTH...

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Rick

Ahh, the power of KDE. I'll possibly be coming back to this, when things have stabilized. By my observations so far it is no problem to start a running service, the command is simply ignored. I'll verify this in a console with the exact commands to be used.

Thanks for your help and support :).

Glad I was able to make a useful suggestion. (heh heh)

Totally off-topic: Have you had any problems with your systems using the Radeon chips? How's the acceleration support? (I'm thinking seriously of dumping my nVidia boards and replacing them with something Radeon-based. I've had nothing but trouble since upgrading to 12.x and haven't gotten any of my systems using nVidia boards to use the proprietary driver yet. I even rendered one system unbootable while following one supposed HOWTO. The nouveau driver is like a cancer and seems to be almost impossible to safely remove from your system. :/ )

No, I haven't any troubles with all three chips, but look at my signature, the ATI-chips are really low-end and none too modern.

Acceleration support ... hmm, I wouldn't know, I'm not the playing type. Give me any reasonable test and I'll try to check for you.

I'm using ATI because I have AMD driven machines. For my needs they provide the best cost / benefit ratio -- and also I like to support the underdog ;).

I was looking at an HD4350 for one of my systems (with an AGP slot). The most advanced nVidia card I have at the moment is running a 6200 chip. (Pretty old.)

I'm no hard-core gamer but I do enjoy blowing off some steam with a few of the OSS FPS games from time to time. There are some other applications that I think benefit from acceleration. (Fspot, for example, is incredibly slow under the nouveau driver. It's either the lack of acceleration or the developers did something very wrong in the version that's shipping with 12.2.)

Understand. I have been thinking about moving to AMD chips for some time myself and, unfortunately, had to RMA a dual Opteron m'board a few years back due to stability problems. (Maybe later this year I can give them another try.)

Anyway... thanks for the data point.

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Rick