Greetings

I am using Lenovo x201s laptop with SSD disk and slackware 14.1-x64 with XFCE desktop. Battery power consumption is super high compared to other distros including even Windows 7. In complete idle with brightness=0 and wifi=off I am getting around 20 CPU wakeups/sec but power consumption goes to around 8-10W! On this laptop it should be around 5-6W, even lower with finest tweaking.

The only packages I have installed/modified over basic installation was getting wicd installed and running, laptop-mode-tools installed and running and iptables configured. Beside that I have also updated all system packages with slackpkg and set scheduler to nano in LILO. Launched discard and noatime options there, set swap to be completely off to reduce writes as I have 8GB of RAM. Temperatures are around 40C and CPU 'ondemand' governor keeps it at 1.2GHz when idle(stock reference 2GHz, turbo 2.8GHz). 8W in pure shell with all powertop turnables, jumps to around 9-10W in XFCE. System baseline estimated 6.6W currently - this is more than I get running Windows 7!

Any ideas what is wrong? Perhaps it's 3.10 kernel itself?

Then control the cpu frequency scaling.

In /etc/rc.d/rc.modules, try changing "CPUFREQ=battery" to "CPUFREQ=on". And then rebooting.

CPU frequency was scaled properly. In fact I was using battery for testing, and on battery it defaults to CPUFREQ=on. It still defaults at 10W while XFCE on debian without any tweaking sits stable at 7W. I can easily drop it below 6W there.

How are you calculating the power consumption?

Looking into this via powertop (which has a newer version [2.7 vs 2.4 in Slackware 14.1]), there are a LOT of tweaks that you'd have to turn on. (I'm running a totally different model of laptop, but I'd expect similar results from the OP.)

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*how to delete this?

I have reduced all tasks in htop to just "htop, init, bash, agetty(x5)". Removed all manually installed modules, also few modules that came with slackware like rc.consolekit or rc.wireless. Also compiled new kernel 4.1.6 to check difference. Tried few tricks and laptop-mode-tools. Disk is using ext4 file system with noatime option for more journaling. All powerTOP turnables are enabled too. But still there is no change in power consumption, in best case it idles at around 8-10W.

Any ideas what could be causing it?

Probably some options passed to the kernel-modules (graphics card?). Check /sys/module/*/parameters. You might also give tlp a try.

Do you have a dual video card setup? Usually Intel + Nvidia? If so, your Nvidia card is likely running without being used. You'll want to set up bumblebee so it can shut down your nvidia card when it's not being used.

Also, what is the frequency range for your CPUs? 1.2GHz seems higher as a minimum than most CPUs I have dealt with (it might be the lowest, but if it can go lower, it would certainly help).

It's first generation of Intel i7-620LM with integrated "Intel HD". 1.2GHz is lowest CPU can go, also test on other distros has been made on same/similar settings. In fact I have set plenty power-saving options on Slackware and it's still much worse than other default kernels. In my opinion it could be some hardware piece drawing just much more power than it should, hence such tweaks as described above do not help with it.

The issue has been (most likely, still not sure) tracked to my SSD or filesystem, sadly at a cost of full format. The drive is MX200 by Crucial and I have just tried ext4 with journaling. Would there be any tips on what to do, as I can't find any different driver module for it?

I perhaps found most odd thing related to this. I have a wifi button on my laptop, having it off disables wifi obviously - it is very common way of saving power. But in my case powerTOP is reporting reversed values - enabling wifi actually shows decreased consumption, disabling it makes it higher. Is there any way of fixing it?

I am going to bump this again. To summarize and with new findings:

My Lenovo Thinkpad x201s draws too much power in IDLE in slackware. The problem is not existent in Windows or other distros.

As of my current findings, measured by software upower/powertop/BAT0 redings/etc my computer can get to really low idle states, like 15 CPU wakeups/sec but the consumption there hits around 8-10W.

Now when I launch something that draws some power, but not much - like turning wifi on(150 wakeups) or running "glxgears"(350 wakeups) the power consumption does not go up from IDLE, but instead goes down - to like 6-7W, dependent on what I run. Putting IDLE computer just to sleep(suspend to RAM) makes it draw similar 6-7W.

Compared with other distros, I get there 5-6W IDLE and 6-7W in light load(100-500 wakeups). This puts my guess at obvious problems with IDLE states. Would anyone be able to tell me what could be causing it?

What does lsmod under slackware and lsmod under debian show?