Just what is up with the energy usage...? i mean laptop battery runs out so quickly

General Discussion
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running qubes on a laptop is a pain in the ass because of the battery discharge

i can fully understand why running so many vm’s would consume a lot of power compared to for example windows but they say that the most battery goes on powering the display

i mean it’s not as if we have any good solution regarding measuring what’s using the battery

how much each qube takes etc… sounds like a good idea to “estimate” at the very least

idk it’s just…
the power usage is just a pain

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xentop shows the seconds of CPU used by each VM, which may be a good proxy for battery usage (if you didn’t shutdown/restart the VM).

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Do you have a Intel CPU with hyperthreading?

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Not sure if it’s resolved for everyone:

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oh not sure if it’s a bug/… i have to look into that for the moment there are more important issues
but yeah… serious bugs and issues so far

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If you have dedicated GPU then it should be your problem. The dedicated GPU is running by default even if it’s not used. You need to install GPU drivers in dom0 and disable dedicated GPU.

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How to do this?

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I would also like to know how to install GPU drivers in dom0 to disable the dedicated GPU. I currently use Qubes on a ThinkPad W540 and have the K2100m dedicated GPU onboard. So far, the average watt consumption is around 34w.

However, if I am correct, many GPU drivers, such as NVIDIA, are not open-source. Therefore, isn’t it risky to install it in dom0?

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They have open sourced the driver, but I don’t know if it is in the mainline kernel yet.

I have tried compiling and installing the nvidia driver in dom0, my experience was that the driver doesn’t work with xen. I tried a few different versions, and they all fail with an “out of memory” error related to the surface render cache, there are threads on the nvidia forums where the official reply to that error is that xen isn’t supported.

Unless you have a professional card with virtualization support like the Quadro cards, I don’t think you can install the driver in dom0.

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This is not exactly true: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules | Hacker News.

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Part of the issue is that Xen’s power management ability is rather limited and dom0 doesn’t have access to all of the hardware that baremetal linux has … so a lot of power saving features that laptops depend on for battery life aren’t available or are managed poorly

B