[Powertop] powertop putting far too much blame on wifi

[Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider at gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1713 bytes --]

Hi:

I just got a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, and I'mrunning Fedora 20 on it.

I'm trying to get power usage down with powertop, but it is producing some 
screwy numbers.   When I run the machine with wifi on, I get idle consumption 
just under 7.2W but almost 5W of that is assigned to the WiFi interface, even 
though there is little traffic. When I turn the wifi off, power consumption 
only drops to just under 7W.  I don't think that there is a phantom WiFi that 
is still consuming power, so it appears to me that powertop is assigning too 
much blame to the WiFi interface.

Is there away of fixing the assignment of blame here?

peter

PS: Here are truncated typical powertop outputs, first with wifi on and then 
with wifi off.

1/
The battery reports a discharge rate of 7.15 W
The estimated remaining time is 3 hours, 39 minutes

Summary: 251.9 wakeups/second, 4.2 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 1.6% 
CPU use

Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
   4.82 W 1.2 pkts/s Device Network interface: wlp1s0 (iwlwifi)
   1.72 W 10.0% Device Display backlight
   131 mW 13.1 ms/s 188.4 Process /usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird
  11.7 mW 398.5 µs/s 19.9 Process [irq/61-iwlwifi]


2/
The battery reports a discharge rate of 6.92 W
The estimated remaining time is 3 hours, 42 minutes

Summary: 453.6 wakeups/second, 23.2 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 3.0% 
CPU use

Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
   1.47 W 10.0% Device Display backlight
   205 mW 14.4 ms/s 197.5 Process /usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird
   184 mW 2.2 ms/s 34.1 Process /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal
   110 mW 2.4 ms/s 164.4 Interrupt PS/2 Touchpad / Keyboard / Mouse