High battery usage with ath11k on Dell 9310

High battery usage with ath11k on Dell 9310

[Mark Herbert]

Simply disabling wifi  drops 0.8-1 watts from power consumption. 
Comparing almost same model (16 gb RAM vs 32) but based on Intel card 
shows the same difference - Intel based laptop with WiFi connected 
consumes about same as ath11k with Wifi discnnected.

Powertop  newer shows PC states below PC6. Disabling WiFi allows PC8, 
disabling ath11k completely (bios) - PC10.

Wifi enabled

            Pkg(HW)
C2 (pc2)   18,5%    |
C3 (pc3)   14,2%    |
C6 (pc6)   47,5%    |
C7 (pc7)    0,0%    |
C8 (pc8)    0,0%    |
C9 (pc9)    0,0%    |
C10 (pc10)  0,0%    |

Wfi disabled (by networkmanager/nm-applet)


            Pkg(HW)
C2 (pc2)   10,8%    |
C3 (pc3)   18,5%    |
C6 (pc6)    1,1%    |
C7 (pc7)    0,3%    |
C8 (pc8)   28,3%    |
C9 (pc9)    0,0%    |
C10 (pc10)  0,0%    |

Seems that even on no network activity ath11k forces CPU to stay awake 
and eat battery. There are some background transfer happening as I have 
Viber, thunderbird and firefox opened so I bet they do sent some but 
there is no file transfers, media streams etc. Under the same conditions 
(taking this disk from one 9310 to other 9310 - same software, same 
kernel - just wifi's different) - iwlwifi manages to reach PC8-PC10 
being connected.  With ath10k on dell XPS-13 9350 intel also was saving 
battery much better than ath10k, bit there was like 88% of PC10 with 
intel and 65% PC10 and 20% PC8 with ath10k. But it was not such terribly 
bad as with ath11.

There is already kernel bug for this, not creating duplicates

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214543







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Re: High battery usage with ath11k on Dell 9310

[Kalle Valo]

Mark Herbert <mark.herbert42@gmail.com> writes:

> Simply disabling wifi  drops 0.8-1 watts from power consumption.
> Comparing almost same model (16 gb RAM vs 32) but based on Intel card
> shows the same difference - Intel based laptop with WiFi connected
> consumes about same as ath11k with Wifi discnnected.
>
> Powertop  newer shows PC states below PC6. Disabling WiFi allows PC8,
> disabling ath11k completely (bios) - PC10.
>
> Wifi enabled
>
>            Pkg(HW)
> C2 (pc2)   18,5%    |
> C3 (pc3)   14,2%    |
> C6 (pc6)   47,5%    |
> C7 (pc7)    0,0%    |
> C8 (pc8)    0,0%    |
> C9 (pc9)    0,0%    |
> C10 (pc10)  0,0%    |
>
> Wfi disabled (by networkmanager/nm-applet)
>
>
>            Pkg(HW)
> C2 (pc2)   10,8%    |
> C3 (pc3)   18,5%    |
> C6 (pc6)    1,1%    |
> C7 (pc7)    0,3%    |
> C8 (pc8)   28,3%    |
> C9 (pc9)    0,0%    |
> C10 (pc10)  0,0%    |
>
> Seems that even on no network activity ath11k forces CPU to stay awake
> and eat battery. There are some background transfer happening as I
> have Viber, thunderbird and firefox opened so I bet they do sent some
> but there is no file transfers, media streams etc. Under the same
> conditions (taking this disk from one 9310 to other 9310 - same
> software, same kernel - just wifi's different) - iwlwifi manages to
> reach PC8-PC10 being connected.  With ath10k on dell XPS-13 9350 intel
> also was saving battery much better than ath10k, bit there was like
> 88% of PC10 with intel and 65% PC10 and 20% PC8 with ath10k. But it
> was not such terribly bad as with ath11.
>
> There is already kernel bug for this, not creating duplicates
>
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214543

Thanks for the excellent report and including all that information to
the bug report as well, we will investigate this.

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Re: High battery usage with ath11k on Dell 9310

[Mark Herbert]

I've tried to apply
[PATCH] ath11k: enable power save in station mode

It did not apply over the ath-next but being applied manually drivers 
compiled and I can now reach PC8 state. And it stays pretty much time 
there -88% if laptop is idle. So I hope if this patch will make it to 
the main tree it will solve one of the bugs.

On 10.10.2021 15:24, Mark Herbert wrote:
> Simply disabling wifi  drops 0.8-1 watts from power consumption. 
> Comparing almost same model (16 gb RAM vs 32) but based on Intel card 
> shows the same difference - Intel based laptop with WiFi connected 
> consumes about same as ath11k with Wifi discnnected.
>
> Powertop  newer shows PC states below PC6. Disabling WiFi allows PC8, 
> disabling ath11k completely (bios) - PC10.
>
> Wifi enabled
>
>            Pkg(HW)
> C2 (pc2)   18,5%    |
> C3 (pc3)   14,2%    |
> C6 (pc6)   47,5%    |
> C7 (pc7)    0,0%    |
> C8 (pc8)    0,0%    |
> C9 (pc9)    0,0%    |
> C10 (pc10)  0,0%    |
>
> Wfi disabled (by networkmanager/nm-applet)
>
>
>            Pkg(HW)
> C2 (pc2)   10,8%    |
> C3 (pc3)   18,5%    |
> C6 (pc6)    1,1%    |
> C7 (pc7)    0,3%    |
> C8 (pc8)   28,3%    |
> C9 (pc9)    0,0%    |
> C10 (pc10)  0,0%    |
>
> Seems that even on no network activity ath11k forces CPU to stay awake 
> and eat battery. There are some background transfer happening as I 
> have Viber, thunderbird and firefox opened so I bet they do sent some 
> but there is no file transfers, media streams etc. Under the same 
> conditions (taking this disk from one 9310 to other 9310 - same 
> software, same kernel - just wifi's different) - iwlwifi manages to 
> reach PC8-PC10 being connected.  With ath10k on dell XPS-13 9350 intel 
> also was saving battery much better than ath10k, bit there was like 
> 88% of PC10 with intel and 65% PC10 and 20% PC8 with ath10k. But it 
> was not such terribly bad as with ath11.
>
> There is already kernel bug for this, not creating duplicates
>
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214543
>
>
>
>
>
>

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Re: High battery usage with ath11k on Dell 9310

[Kalle Valo]

Mark Herbert <mark.herbert42@gmail.com> writes:

> I've tried to apply
> [PATCH] ath11k: enable power save in station mode
>
> It did not apply over the ath-next but being applied manually drivers
> compiled and I can now reach PC8 state. And it stays pretty much time
> there -88% if laptop is idle. So I hope if this patch will make it to
> the main tree it will solve one of the bugs.

Thanks for testing, I'll prioritise this patch so that it's applied
quickly.

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