Bad battery life on Xubuntu 16.04 Lenovo T460s

Question

The battery life of my new Lenovo T460s is very bad (about 4,5h with a little bit browsing and half display contrast).

Xubuntu 16.04 shows two batteries (SANYO 00HW022 and SANYO 01AV405). They were drained one after the other. I'm not sure how the batteries are integrated in the notebook, but I ordered it with only one (fixed) battery.

Is there something I can do to increase the battery life? Is it a recognition problem of the battery?

It would be good to add more information about your setup. Did you install anything like tlp or is it a normal xubuntu Installation? I think it is a new skylake CPU, normally newer hardware is not so well supported even if it is intel. — Kev Inski, Apr 13 '16 at 15:32
according to the lenovo shop, there are two build-in batteries (one front and one back), so it is normal that the OS sees both. — Kev Inski, Apr 13 '16 at 17:11
Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! ;-) As Ubuntu 16.04 is not officially released yet you should use launchpad to file a bug so the developers are aware of this and can track it. — Fabby, Apr 14 '16 at 10:48
linux skylake support is currently woeful. Processor cannot use most of the low power states it has. Nothing you can do for a little while until it improves. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html — , Apr 14 '16 at 05:14
It's just an Intel, as the nvidia dedicated version was not released in Germany — Atomius, Apr 16 '16 at 03:04
If you're from Germany you may ask your question in the german ThinkPad-Forum. — linrunner, Apr 17 '16 at 07:44

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 15 '16 at 21:14

6

What you can do to increase the battery-life is installing tlp with some additional stuff

sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw acpi-call-dkms

tlp is in the official ubuntu repo since 15.10. More information are available here. The man-page is in english

man tlp

You can also install thinkfan which can reduce the noise-level and can save some energy. You should also install powertop

sudo apt-get install thinkfan powertop

powertop is a really powerful tool writen by intel.

edited Apr 15 '16 at 21:14

linrunner

1,387

answered Apr 13 '16 at 17:21

Kev Inski

1,021

Can you help me analysing my powertop output?
http://pastebin.com/n2w1anTp
– Atomius Apr 29 '16 at 12:34

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 14 '16 at 05:22

1

You should watch your computer enviroment (eg, making sure the the cpu doesn't get too hot, don't run too much applications, so on.) You could use tlp. tlp is excellent on many Linux computers.

sudo apt-get install tlp

answered Apr 14 '16 at 05:22

(to switch between ac and battery, type tlp ac and battery: tlp battery – May 29 '16 at 00:48

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 06 '16 at 11:33

As reported in previous comments, Skylake support for laptops in Linux is currently not perfect. More info here: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html. If you start Powertop, you'll probably find out that the deepest power saving state you can get is PC2 (under Idle stats/Package), which is apparently quite bad, and even potentially dangerous for the cpu. Launch powertop with sudo powertop --auto-tune, and see if you can get anything better: using that option I can now get a PC7 state; notice that first I updated the bios to the latest version (1.13), but I'm not sure this makes any difference. Hopefully next kernel updates will make things work better. Nice machine, anyway :)

Bad battery life on Xubuntu 16.04 Lenovo T460s

3 Answers3