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Ethernet port consuming lots of power
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  1. #1
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    Ethernet port consuming lots of power

    Hi,

    I've noticed my laptop getting much hotter than normal recently, and having shorter battery life.

    I've tracked it down to the ethernet port (00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03), driver is e1000e) which powertop says is the biggest single consumer of power at rates of 11.8 to 16.4W.

    The port is not in use (I have no wired connection). The issue persists with all the recent kernels I have on my machine (2.6.40-4, 2.6.40.3-0, 2.6.40.4-5, 2.6.40.6-0). I guess this means it is a configuration problem?

    Is there a way of powering down the ethernet port (since I don't use it?).

    Thanks
    M.

  2. #2
    stevea Guest

    Re: Ethernet port consuming lots of power

    There is something way wrong with that claim.

    My laptop (F14) has the same enet port and the entire laptop uses ~12-15 watts. I strongly suspect that the power numbers are taken from your system's ACPI figures, and frankly most ACPI are full of bugs. I think you are just seeing an erroneous ACPI report.

    If it was true your enet interface would need a heatsink and still feel VERY hot - verify that's not the case.


    See if
    acpi -V
    agrees. I think it will also mis-report the same.

    Try blacklisting the e1000e driver and rebooting, or maybe you can entirely disable the interface in your BIOS.
    I'll wager the system power usage remains the same within a watt.

    ========

    Maybe you can post more details - what laptop/portable system do you have ? Which fedora are you running ? Are your processors correctly speed-stepping when idle ? (which C-state & P-stat are they in ? when doing little ?). Is screen brightness modulatnig OK ? (dim on idle for a while).
    Last edited by stevea; 18th October 2011 at 04:06 PM.

  3. #3
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    Re: Ethernet port consuming lots of power

    Hi,

    I'm just reporting what powertop says. It says:

    Code:
    The battery reports a discharge rate of 21.6 W
    The estimated remaining time is 169 minutes
    
    Summary: 264.4 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/second and 0.0 VFS ops/sec
    
    Power est.	Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
      17.7 W      0.0 pkts/s                Device         Network interface: eth0 (e1000e)
      4.13 W    100.0%                      Device         USB device: usb-device-04d9-1133
      2.10 W     73.3%                      Device         Display backlight
      100 mW    100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D0: IDT
     98.9 mW    100.0%                      Device         Radio device: btusb
        0 mW     24.1 ms/s      25.5        Process        /usr/bin/gnome-shell
        0 mW     12.3 ms/s       1.0        Process        powertop
    acpi -V gives:
    Code:
    Battery 0: Discharging, 83%, 02:28:13 remaining
    Battery 0: design capacity 7650 mAh, last full capacity 6011 mAh = 78%
    Adapter 0: off-line
    Thermal 0: ok, 47.5 degrees C
    Thermal 0: trip point 0 switches to mode critical at temperature 107.0 degrees C
    Cooling 0: LCD 4 of 15
    Cooling 1: Processor 0 of 10
    Cooling 2: Processor 0 of 10
    It is much hotter than it used to be - resting my hands on it is uncomfortable, and working with it on my lap basically impossible for more than a minute or so. It USED to be the coolest laptop I had ever used (has an SSD etc). (Its a Dell latitude E6500)

    So there may be a bug with acpi or powertop, but *something* is still making it run hot, and it isn't the processors.

    Cheers
    M.

    ---------- Post added at 07:35 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:26 AM ----------

    Hi again,

    Disabling the NIC in BIOS was a great idea. The laptop is running significantly cooler.

    This is what powertop now says:
    Code:
    The battery reports a discharge rate of 16.4 W
    The estimated remaining time is 200 minutes
    
    Summary: 279.1 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/second and 0.0 VFS ops/sec
    
    Power est.	Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
      4.28 W      6.7%                      Device         Display backlight
      3.46 W      9.0 ms/s      70.7        Process        /usr/bin/X :0 vt1 -background none -nolisten tcp -auth /var/run/kdm/A:0-goYC0b
      2.67 W    200.9 ms/s      54.5        Timer          tick_sched_timer
      1.53 W     10.2 ms/s      31.2        Process        /usr/bin/gnome-shell
      1.44 W    100.0%                      Device         Radio device: btusb
      1.42 W     52.0 ms/s      29.0        Process        /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox
      1.38 W      1.0 ms/s      28.1        Timer          hrtimer_wakeup
      803 mW      0.8 ms/s      16.4        Interrupt      [6] tasklet(softirq)
      496 mW      7.9 ms/s      10.1        kWork          ttm_bo_delayed_workqueue
      281 mW     97.3 µs/s       5.7        Interrupt      [20] ehci_hcd:usb2
      249 mW    100.0%                      Device         USB device: usb-device-04d9-1133
      239 mW    293.8 µs/s       4.9        Interrupt      [9] RCU(softirq)
      236 mW    100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D0: IDT
    Still not sure what caused it...

    Thanks
    M.

    ---------- Post added at 08:06 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:35 AM ----------

    Since this is reproducible (re-enabling NIC in BIOS reliably causes overheating), I could report as a bug. But:

    1) on what component? kernel?
    2) any suggestions for what useful information I would need to attach?

    cheers
    M.

  4. #4
    stevea Guest

    Re: Ethernet port consuming lots of power

    Well the power difference is 21.6-16.4 = 5.2W. That's a lot less than powertop reported, but it's near the high end of what a GigE + phy should ever draw. So the enet misbehaving could explain the ~5Watt of battery drain (never 11-17W).

    It's very unclear why this should be happening. You try to blacklist the driver, like this ...
    su -
    <passwd>
    echo "blacklist e1000e" >> /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf
    reboot

    and re-enable in BIOS.

    It *MAY* allow the same powersaving as the bios setting. If you try this please report the result as the problem may be the driver (and needs to be reported) or else it may be the Dell design somehow.

  5. #5
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    Re: Ethernet port consuming lots of power

    That almost sounds like a short at the connector... especially if it isn't plugged in.

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