Linux power regression + overheating problem on ThinkPad [fixed?]

By Adnan Hodzic, Published November 12, 2011

This blog post isn’t only directed to ThinkPad owners as most notebook Linux users with Intel Core Duo 1/2 and i3/i5/i7 processors have been affected by this bug if not all. And yes, this problem is present on latest Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 11.10.

Prelude

I’m owner of Thinkpad X300, great machine except the fact that just recently I replaced its 3rd cooling fan!  Yea, I do a lot of compiling and it’s on all the time, but still this kind of things shouldn’t happen. I first linked this problem to the fact that Thinkpad fan on Linux (as of 2.6.22) always works at what’s its basically maximum RPM, thus the reason there are numerous fan control scripts. My favorite one is Thinkfan, but controlling fan doesn’t really help if you have a overheating problem. For matter of a fact it working on its maximum speed might only help, with its own toll.

As of kernel 2.6.38 up until 3.1 (still present) there has been a problem of power regression but besides this I had slight problem with overheating. Regarding overheating in beginning I tried reporting bugs, tried different Thinkfan configurations, blamed proprietary software such as Adobe Flash for spiking up CPU temperature, however this problem was somewhat solved. After numerous battery calibrations and as these didn’t work in the end for battery life getting poorer with each day, I just blamed the factor that notebook  was getting pretty old (~3 years).

Then the consumer woke up inside of me and I thought it was time to get new notebook. I laid my eyes upon ThinkPad X1 thing of beauty except one mayor drawback, its price. I did some reading on X1 and interesting enough, X300 comes with Core Duo 2 L7100 but overheating + power regression was still present even on latest Intel Core I* series. Reading this killed the consumer and woke up the hacker side.

Solution

Initial workaround to the problems of power regression is to add “pcie_aspm=force” besides existing GRUB boot arguments, this did help to some point but what really helped in both cases was also adding “i915.i915_enable_rc6=1″ or at least I thought so since this line only applies to Sandy Bridge (i3/i5/i7) and latter. In the end my “/etc/default/grub” looks like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1"

and make sure you run “update-grub” after making these changes. Besides the arguments I used there are other ones you can use and for more info please head to ”Tweaks To Extend The Battery Life Of Intel Linux Notebooks“.

Results I ended up with such simple tweak are more then satisfactory as I got some ~45 extra minutes of battery life besides the fact that it lowered temperature by some ~10 °C. Guess this also gives me extra time until I get a chance to lay my hands on X1 :)

P.S:

After I posted this some argued that this is a workaround rather then a fix and folks at [Phoronix] just posted what they call a proper solution to this problem.  Also please note although Sandy Bridge users that enable this might sometimes get a video corruption bug, i915_enable_rc6 is still supposed to get enabled by default in 3.2. So logical conclusion you can come up with is unless you’re troubled by this problem, you might not want to use this “work around/fix” at this point. And hope it’ll be fixed in future releases of your favorite Linux distribution.

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  • Anonymous

    I made the same changes to my dell xps 15 z laptop weeks ago, and from 2 hours of battery live it jumped to 5 hours. This was possible too thanks to the bumblebee project and a little research of the right acpi calls for my machine (thanks to the user who posted them in the bumblebee github site) as this laptop has nvidia optimus.

  • http://tomslominski.net/ Tom Slominski

    I’ve had my Toshiba laptop for 3-4 years (maybe even 5!) and the other month I had to pay nearly £100 to get it insides cleaned out of dust. Now it doesn’t overheat as much even though Ubuntu 11.10 is pushing it to maximum (since 11.10 I had massive problems with it, it’s such a bloody pain to use nowadays, but that’s another problem on it’s own…). Anyway, I recommend that you take it to a local computer shop and tell them to tear it apart and take all the dust out. Or just do it yourself :)

  • Anonymous

    DON’T DO THIS!

    I had the same problem, and when I first read about pcie_aspm=force, I added it to my grub.cfg file. Result was, as you said, about 45 minutes of extra battery life. 4 weeks later, my battery was dead and the overheating problems started to get worse! I don’t know if what I experienced will happen for everyone (I don’t think it will), but it will probably happen for some, like it did for me.

    • Alessandro Roncone

      This probably is only a fortuity: you modified grub, and 4 weeks later you experienced the death of your battery, but there may not be a causality relation between these two events! I used the pcie_aspm=force workaround since natty, and it worked great for me!

      Now it’s time to try the new fix :)

      • Anonymous

        … I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that I saw my battery’s capacity going down a bit every few days in gnome-power-statistics since I applied that line to my grub.cfg. Neither do I think it’s a coincidence that a few weeks later I started getting messages on login saying my battery’s capacity was very low. Another week later and my battery was dead (meaning the battery only had enough power left to go from pressing to power button to showing the login screen, before the battery was empty and it had to shutdown again).

        Well, your choise. Can’t say I didn’t warn you.

        • http://twitter.com/poinck André

          What is normal for the battery capacity? Since I used the Thinkpad X1 without the tweaks and Linux kernel 3.0.0-1-amd64 the capacity lost 4% in 2 weeks. So, I believe I had to make the adjustments to the grub-config in order to save my battery. If I will notice more decrease in capacity in shorter time, than I have to disable these tweaks. I hope not!

          • Anonymous

            Maybe this did some damage to the hardware as well, because simply reverting the line to its original state didn’t stop the effects of it. I had to reinstall Ubuntu to stop it from further killing my battery (well, at a 5 minute battery life this wasn’t really any use, but still).

          • https://launchpad.net/~cwd-simpson Carl

            “reverting the line to its original state didn’t stop the effects”

            That should be telling you something about the causal relationship between these tweaks and the effects you experienced.

        • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

          Err on the side of caution. That’s wise. If you have evidence to suggest something, then you can prove or disprove. But don’t _believe_. You don’t have to. This is open source. It is possible to understand the causal relationship if there is any.

          A few years back, I helped a user who had just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and he was very upset that Ubuntu had switched the audio channels so he got left in right ear and vice versa.  It turned out that he had mistakenly turned the headphones when he placed them on his head. Since he had just switched to Ubuntu, it was obvious to him that Ubuntu was to blame. It may seem funny, but it is what happens to us when we turn to blind beliefs instead of understanding causality. The brain has a mind of its own, and it’s extremely good at finding patterns where none exist.

    • Anonymous

      It may be a coincidence, but I also tried pcie_aspm=force and in just a few day my battery lost over 70% capacity!
      Maybe it’s not related, but it seems I’m not the onlyone with such doubts

    • http://www.facebook.com/Prashere Prasanna Venkadesh

      yes it is.. Same happened for me too.. and i have dual boot ubuntu 11.10 and Windoz 7 and after reading this post i modified and added pcie_aspm = force and as you said i experienced battery failure and overheating in approx. 3 weeks. what did you do after? is there any way to bring back? now i am gonna remove it from my grub file.

      • Anonymous

        No way to undo it. If the battery’s lost it’s capacity there’s no way to get it back. You could try getting it inside your computer’s warrantee due to the overheating, but I’m not sure if that’ll work.

    • Anonymous

      I won’t say I told you so but… I told you so ;)
      Might be a good idea to mention this great risk in the article before others make the same mistake?

  • http://twitter.com/no_mans_land_00 no man’s land

    thank very much, that’s for Ubuntu and a like, but what about fedora? is there any issues with it? thx

    • Anonymous

      Anything using the modern kernel are affected.

  • Tolga Aydemir

    dell xps 15: 2h
    + ironhide = 4:30h
    + i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 = 6:45 h
    ehm sorry while typing it shows me 7:58h

    omg!!!! no WTF!! 8:51h !!
    what is wrong here? xD i think typing does not have an effect on my quadcore i7 cpu xD nice.

    thanks & i hope kernel 3.2 will be great!

    (win7 = 5:30h)

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_4SLO5M5R5HHXLPLVTB4VJ4AGSQ Pavan kumar.L

      I have dell xps 15 with i7. I installed ironhide but the effect was just another 20 minutes to the original 2 hrs. I tried each and every script from the configuration menu but with no success. I’m still searching for the right script. If anyone got any having similar hardware please post the link here

      • http://twitter.com/malachi54 Jonny54

        there was a script with over 20 “likes” i tooked it and yes i had my 4-5 hours xP
        i hope it will work for you

      • Anonymous

        For me on Samsung rf511 with Nvidia turned off it’s 2x the battery life I get normally (I don’t remember the exact number beacuse I use my laptop as a desktop mostly).

    • Anonymous

      Lenovo ideapad z570, i5, nvidia optimus? Unable to use bumblebee or Ironhide, any tips ?? I know, a forum is a better place to ask. But, any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance :-)

    • Rakhesh KP

      Hi, I am new to ubuntu 11.10. Plase tell me how you configured ironhide and i915.i915_enable_rc6=1. Please do it in step by step

      Thankyou

      • Anonymous

        you can also try askubuntu for your questions.

  • zhang gang

    t410′s default
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”

  • Sohrab Naushad

    Nice grammar.

    • Anonymous

      Agreed – probably the worst article I’ve come across on OMG Ubuntu. Please don’t butcher our language.

      • Luis Miguel García Con

        I bet you know other languages.

        • Anonymous

          Hai. :)

          David Metcalfe

        • http://twitter.com/HappySinger Dave The :-) Singer

          That’s not the point. The point is that the author was writing for an English-language website.

    • Anonymous

      Yeah, lrn 2 speel, bro. What an embarasment.

  • http://profiles.google.com/herophuong93 Phương Hero

    OT: Does anyone know what’s going on with the omgubuntu logo?

  • dima mulenko
    • http://mark-y-a.myopenid.com/ Marky

      russian? can’t read it. .. pls show english translation.

      • dima mulenko

        finally has made results similar windows 7
        asus k53sj
        default ubuntu 11.10 x86 – two hoursubuntu 11.10 x86 + ironhide + pcie_aspm=force + jupiter – four hours

        ubuntu 11.10 x86 + ironhide + jupiter + pcie_aspm=force + i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1 – six hours

        • http://mark-y-a.myopenid.com/ Marky

          Frack! I’m not getting any added hours. Not even minutes. :( Batt life is still half what I get on Ubuntu vs Windows.

          How is performance w/ FBC on and what are you using Unity or GS?

          • dima mulenko

            I use unity. In quiet performance did not notice the difference with fbc, the average energy consumption 12 w.

      • http://azangru.livejournal.com/ azangru

        Ukrainian, I believe :-)
        Says the laptop will function 5 hours 53 minutes on a battery charge.

  • http://twitter.com/howythegeek Howard Birch

    So… Lil’ bit OT here, would this problem possibly apply with Windows as well..? As my Lenovo has sluggish battery life at all times. I think the culprit might be Windows.

  • http://twitter.com/poinck André

    Reading all the comments is a bit scary. I am now with the two tweaks in my grub-config, First impression: CPU-temperature has gone down by nearly 10 degrees. Normaly I use “powersave” as default for the most task I am doing with my laptop, except when I do some graphics editing with Inkscape. I didn’t had a chance to test my battery life yet.

    My hardware/software:
    Thinkpad X1 i5 with Debian-testing
    Linux 3.0.0-1-amd64

    • http://twitter.com/daemonizy Geeky

      did you have your keyboard backlight working?

  • Anonymous

    Either I never noticed it or my laptop (ThinkPad X60s) doesn’t seem to suffer from this. Battery life is good enough (as good as it’s always been) and I can’t really talk about overheating since these laptops have a mild overheating problem by default (the right palm rest can get a bit hot). But thanks for the tips, I’ll try them and see if they have any impact.

    Completely off-topic: Adnan, why the X1? I understand the wanting to upgrade, the new Core iSomethings are miles ahead of the Core 2s, but the thing I love the most about the ThinkPad line is the keyboard, full size, perfect feel and key response, and most of all, having all the usual keys where they are supposed to be. When I first learned that the X1′s keyboard would be ‘chiclet’ and not have the usual layout I immediately lost all interest, add to that the non-matte display and the poor resolution and it’s really a no go. So I’d be very interested in understanding why you find the X1 to be the best upgrade path in Lenovo’s current line-up.

    I personaly think it’s a shame there is no real successor to the X300/X301, the X220 is awesome but the keyboard can feel a bit cramped (even though it’s incredibly usable for such a small laptop). There should be an X320 or something, with the same specs as the X220, but with a higher resolution screen and a bit bigger keyboard, that would be my perfect machine. Right now I’m torn between the X220 and the T420…

    • http://twitter.com/EhrmanDigfoot Ehrman

      I bought an X1.  I love the keyboard.  It is by far the most comfortable one I’ve ever owned or used anywhere.  I like glossy screens, don’t mind the glare, but the resolution and viewing angle are genuinely terrible.

      • Anonymous

        I agree on the viewing angles also. Lenovo seems to skimp a bit on the displays on the whole ThinkPad line. That’s another area where the X220 and the optional IPS display get some points.

        About the X1′s keyboard, the closer I’ve used to it was a ThinkPad Edge of a friend. Not sure if they have the same feel, but the Edge’s keyboard was not a bad keyboard per se, and it was certainly the best chiclet keyboard I’ve ever typed on. But it also was no ThinkPad keyboard. Have you ever typed on a “normal” ThinkPad keyboard? Do you find the X1′s keyboard more usable than that?

        • Anonymous

          The keyboard was the number one selling factor for me, since I spend most of my time writing. I tested several other thinkpad keyboards before buying the X1 and I like them as well. But something about the tight spacing and the concave form of the x1′s keys just felt perfect to me. The angle of the keyboard and the hand rests are ideal as well, but you find that on other larger thinkpads.

          • Anonymous

            I see, different strokes for different folks ;)

            The lack of proper palm resting space is one of the main problems I see with the X220.

  • http://owaislone.org/ Owais Lone

    I’m already on Kernel 3.2 on 11.10. :)
    Downloaded from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.2-rc1-oneiric/

  • xpress razor

    I had written this at ubuntu forums long time ago (4 weeks).

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1859945

    and there was another post at

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11372380

    If you have sandy bridge processor with AMD graphics card (that means dual graphics card) you have to use opensource drivers and disable it using

    modprobe radeon
    echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

    in /etc/rc.local

    And my /etc/default/grub looks like this

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1″

    However problem with this is I have random lock ups (Ubuntu freezes), e.g while playing Unreal Tournament 2004 (Native Linux Client) or on some random work. Solution to this is to enable xorg-edgers and intel-sna ppa

    $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
    $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sarvatt/intel-sna

    Downside of this is Unity 3D does not work.

    • http://mark-y-a.myopenid.com/ Marky

      What about the 3rd option “i915.i915_enable_fbc=1″? Does it make any difference if you add that into the grub line too? *but i think this will be bad for Unity/Compiz

      • xpress razor

        It enables frame buffer compression (compresses the graphics memory of screen), which uses less memory, thus saves power by some percentage. In 11.04(default kernel) I had noticed glitches using fbc, which is not the case in 11.10 (any kernel above 3 is great in graphics for sandy bridge processors). Intel is still working on xserver-xorg-video-intel to fully support intel HD 3000.

  • Felix Perez

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1″

    This has been my grub line since I bought my core i5. I get many more hours off my battery. I sent this comment to OMG about 2 months ago.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/3NUIPRTUA4KERN4HEUK42AX4ZQ Zach

    This happens on my Toshiba Satellite L505D-S5983 and it is an AMD latop.

    • Anonymous

      Also happens to my Toshiba Satellite L305-S5970, With Intel Core 2  Duo processor.

  • Luigi Forte

    Hi,
    I am using Ubuntu 11.10 with a Dell Inspiron 15r powered by an i3-2310M.
    In order to increase battery life, I’ve enabled RC6 a couple of weeks ago.It worked, but it looks like I am one of those users that are experiencing video corruption with RC6 enabled. I’d like to use all the battery life available, but at the same time glitches are rather disappointing.
    What could I do?

    Thank you in advance,
    Luigi

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_5O3QKOD3OSEM3ILBHBPCBFKNDM Juan Jose

      I have a new dell 15z and i have been experimenting similar problems.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JIX4TG4UKFGUX3WC4VVNZHGN4A John

    You guys have no idea how much this over heating, continous fan running  and poor battery life problem had affected me. IBM Thinkpad L412 model.  I had to switchback to Windoze 7. The battery life was almost double of what  I got in ubuntu/kubuntu/lubuntu. I just hope this works….I cant stand windows anymore. If it does work, I just want to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU x Millions. Plz plz let it work.

    • Anonymous

      Hey try installing any propriety drivers or graphics drivers for your thinkpad.Try updating your bios.Usually installing graphics drivers 
      solves battery issue at least did for my laptop.I had same situation hope that works :)

    • http://johannpopper.myopenid.com/ Johann Popper

      Don’t listen to any of the hitherto useless comments on here. There is and has ever been only one solution to the disfunctional fan/overheating/over-power-consumption problems, and there has been a huge open source cover up for all kinds of bizarre human reasons, like pride, arrogance, ignorance, etc. The Linux media and designers have utterly failed to acknowledge problems and proliferate solutions. The information in this article has been known for months, yet only now do the hoi polloi get to taste it. This happens to many more than those who have Intel. Most mainstream laptops can be fixed with the solution below.

      Listen: just open a terminal. Type ‘gksu nautilus’ (if in Ubuntu) or ‘kdesu dolphin’ (if in KDE) or somehow open a good old fashioned sane and easy file manager as root. Navigate to root /etc/default/grub.cfg. Open grub.cfg. Go to this line and change it like so:

      GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash pcie_aspm=force acpi_osi=”Linux” ”

      Delete quiet splash if your Plymouth splash doesn’t work. Add ‘pcie_aspm=force’ to fix the horrendous and inexcusable over-heating power regression for portable computers long ignored by arrogant programmers. Add ‘acpi_osi=”Linux”‘ to get your fan working if it isn’t.

      Then open a terminal, and type ‘sudo update-grub’. Press Enter. Reboot. Abracadabra. Everything works.

      Learn your file system. See how things work. Trust no one except me and the chap who gave a further solution for Thinkpads, lol.

      • Bryan Ross

        Thanks.  This worked great for me on my T61p.

  • Anonymous

    Does this problem/solution affect Thinkpad x40. The processor is:
    Intel Pentium M (Banias)  or
    Intel Pentium M (Dothan) Can anyone answer?

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CQ4GJ5OG3N5BE4VF7RYHNVPO6E P

    Are Atom processors also affected by this power regression?

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CQ4GJ5OG3N5BE4VF7RYHNVPO6E P

      – apparently not. I added the pcie_aspm=force and the rc6 to the grub but according to powertop the discharge rate in idle state remained at 7.2-7.3 Watts before and after these tweaks

    • http://kyoushuu.users.sourceforge.net Arnel A. Borja

      According to this article in Phoronix, Intel Atom processors are affected to some extent: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_mobile_uffda&num=1
      I still haven’t tried it yet though.

  • http://thepcspy.com/ Oli Warner

    I know I’m a bit late to point this out but nobody else seems to have yet: rc6 does not improve power usage, it increases performance (and in doing so, uses more power).

    You could argue that with fixed workloads like transcoding audio files, rc6 would still give you gain as you’d complete the work faster but for CPU-bottlenecked things like playing games where the time spent is up to the user, rc6 will hurt battery performance.

    Not sure what it does to idle performance.

    Not enabling rc6 is essentially just limiting how fast your CPU can run (like underclocking in respect to battery usage) so use it wisely.

    My source for all that is several Phoronix articles and personal experience with an i3.

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      Can you explain how increasing performance could ever mean using more power? It seems to me that most software becomes more efficient by doing less, which requires less power.

      • http://thepcspy.com/ Oli Warner

        Think of a game. Because rc6 improves performance, a game can run at a higher frame rate. More frames its technically more work, so even though it does a frame more efficiently, because the CPU can now handle more work at once, and a game will scale up, more power is used.

  • George Wright

    Unfortunately after trying this suggestion my battery life decreased to only an hour on full charge :( Rolling back the changes. I really hope they fix it soon.

  • Anonymous

    They need to fix the overheating issue with all nVidia cards!  My laptop gets up well over 200 degrees when gaming, and it never ever gets that hot while gaming on windows…  i hate windows, but it keeps me from melting my laptop!  I’ve talked with many others with the same issue with their nVidia cards, one had the same card as me.  nVidia GeForce 9600m GT.  Gets blisteringly hot playing Minecraft, stays nice and cool playing minecraft on windows…  Same with any other games, but the main one i play is minecraft…  That game shouldn’t make any graphics card sweat too hard!

  • http://twitter.com/HappySinger Dave The :-) Singer

    This was painful to read.

  • Andrea Ceolin

    but all intel cpu’s have this problem?
    ‘ve a p8400 (hp dv5 1030el) and I have not noticed change in power consumption from 11.04 to 11.10…

  • Andrea Ceolin

    But all intel cpu’s have this problem?
    I have not noticed a change in power consumption from 11.04 to 11.10 (my 3 old battery life is about 80min…)

  • http://twitter.com/etsnyman Etienne Snyman

    This is a humble request for using the instructions on http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTYwNA to see if it also helps. I am using an AMD laptop, but it still runs at 10-20 degrees C hotter than Windows 7. I hope a power user knows how to apply those instructions, as I don’t. Ubuntu: Linux for Humans after all?!?

  • Anonymous

    Wow, interesting.  My T520 with an i7 quad-core throttles the fan just fine, and core temps rarely rise above ~50 degrees celsius.  I’m using kernel 3.1 myself.  As for power conservation: if your Thinkpad model uses hybrid graphics, turn off the discreet Nvidia card in the BIOS.  By default, the card is powered on under Linux regardless of wether you have the Nvidia or Nouveau drivers installed; unless you need 3D rendering while on battery power (really?), just turn it off.  This gives me about an hour of extra battery life; using laptop-mode-tools to switch on powersaving mode for my hard drives gives me another 30 minutes or so, for a total of about 4 hours or so on a full charge.

    And it’s true, the Linux kernel has never handled power saving as well as the NT and Darwin kernels; sad.  Let’s hope for improvement in the future.

  • http://corrytonapple.myopenid.com/ Corrytonapple

    I use a cooling pad available at Amazon or walmart.  Plug it into the USB port and it pushes all the air in the computer.  No, it doesn’t stop the CPU from making all the heat, but it keeps your lap cool, and instead of tearing a laptop apart you return the pad to Walmart for a new one.
    My fan doesn’t seem to come on enough with the Toshiba L455, but I’m on Debian Testing.

  • Anonymous

    so, i went back to 10.10……

  • Martin Camille

    I just installed the new kernel 3.2 rc7 and my dell Inspirion STILL overheats! I am tired of all the crashes and losing my work, also fear hardware damage. Any solutions yet?

  • Anonymous

    Same issue on my Asus u30sd. Hopefully it should be solved in the 3.3 kernel.

 
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