I am getting terrible battery life on my MacBook Pro on Arch Linux (only about two hours). I have cpupower, powertop, and macfanctld enabled. I had to use macOS for a project recently and I realized that I was getting a lot better battery life (closer to 5 hours). Does anyone have ideas of how to troubleshoot?
@sumner This is how I dealt with it on my system, though if you have a dGPU, that's probably your biggest culprit: https://www.newnix.space/blog/2015/7/23/dealing-with-power-drain-on-gnulinux-for-intel-based-machines
@architect @seasharp @Ghosty @wheeler @AmericanIdiot @Jasper_Ben an update on my battery life status. I haven't had a great opportunity to test it yet, but I did what you suggested and powertop went from ~40W power consumption to ~20W and it says that I will be getting ~4 hrs rather than ~2 which is much better. I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.
@sumner @Jasper_Ben @wheeler @Ghosty @seasharp @architect Based on that article, I switched from the newer intel driver back to ACPI. On either "powersave" or "conservative" governor, the CPU fan is MUCH less active during light use. And this is on a System76 Galago, so it is not just limited to Apple hardware.
@seasharp @Ghosty @wheeler @Jasper_Ben @sumner @AmericanIdiot Yeah, it's a problem impacting certain intel SKUs, their intel_pstate cpu frequency scaling driver just goes crazy with them