Manjaro - Few issues

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

Okay so I am having a few issues with Manjaro.
So I have updated to 3.19 kernel via their settings manager and I have also swapped to proprietary drivers.
So I used powertop to check my battery draw and its at 13.9W
Here is what Powertop is showing me.
The battery reports a discharge rate of 12.4 W
The estimated remaining time is 1 hours, 51 minutes

Summary: 1368.2 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 93.8% CPU use

            Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
        495.7 ms/s     545.0        Process        /usr/lib/firefox/plugin-container /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so -g
        196.8 ms/s     305.2        Process        /usr/bin/firefox
         54.7 ms/s     236.9        Process        /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog
          4.8 ms/s     162.7        kWork          od_dbs_timer
        129.4 ms/s       3.9        Process        /usr/lib/xorg-server/Xorg :0 -seat seat0 -auth /run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten t
          5.8 ms/s      42.4        Process        xfwm4
        538.6 us/s      18.3        Process        [rcu_preempt]
          7.5 ms/s       8.7        Timer          hrtimer_wakeup
          4.4 ms/s       8.7        Process        /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal
        264.4 us/s       9.6        kWork          ieee80211_iface_work
         16.8 ms/s       1.0        Process        powertop
          1.5 ms/s       6.7        Interrupt      [6] tasklet(softirq)
          6.2 ms/s       1.9        Timer          tick_sched_timer
          1.7 ms/s       2.9        Interrupt      [7] sched(softirq)
        409.2 us/s       1.9        Process        pamac-tray
        280.0 us/s       1.9        Process        /usr/bin/pamac-daemon
          3.0 ms/s      0.00        Timer          delayed_work_timer_fn
         83.9 us/s       1.0        Process        /usr/lib/rtkit/rtkit-daemon
         71.2 us/s       1.0        Process        /usr/lib/xfce4/panel/wrapper-1.0 /usr/lib/xfce4/panel/plugins/libwhiskermenu.so
         68.0 us/s       1.0        Process        /usr/bin/ntpd -g -u ntp:ntp
         67.5 us/s       1.0        Process        /usr/lib/accountsservice/accounts-daemon
         51.1 us/s       1.0        Process        /usr/bin/wpa_supplicant -u
         41.3 us/s       1.0        Process        /usr/bin/gpg-agent --sh --daemon --write-env-file /home/xdroidie/.cache/gpg-age
         19.0 us/s       1.0        kWork          push_to_pool
         12.2 us/s       1.0        kWork          flush_to_ldisc

Now my CPU should not be in use that much, I have 3 tabs open in firefox and nothing to major in the background so what steps can I take to reduce the power draw on both the battery and the CPU?

Thanks

2

htop will show you resource usage stats which might be more useful for that kind of thing.

3

Well, there's a heap of optimisations that you can do to your system to save battery life but it takes a fair bit of testing to find a happy balance between performance and power management. Without accurately calibrated power monitoring equipment to check your voltage drops, power deviation and capacity, testing methods are going to be tedious - especially with tools like PowerTop. Generally with power debugging you need to look at CPU wattage per application and the coefficient of determination/R^2.

Some things you can easily manually debug to get a little extra power would be;

  1. Checking if there is any anomolous application I/O writes and sync'd data via tracing subprocess'.
  2. Finding any Memory leaks and creating custom cache directories and using tmpfs ie; throwing certain applications/process' into a ramdisk location and then creating cron jobs, to drop said cache if need be.
  3. Recompile your kernel and configure it for better power management by removing the cruft and customising the CPU frequency governor etc.
  4. Also using perf for deeper hardware profiling and kernel debugging. Perf Linky
  5. Undervolting/clocking your system.