Thinkpad T480 gets pretty hot and battery barely lasts

Hi!

First off let me start off by thanking the Qubes OS project for kicking off this discourse group, Google stuff is making me sick.

Now I have a Thinkpad T480 and I’ve been using Qubes OS with it since the first day that I bought it with.

The only problems I’m experiencing now is that after nearly 1 year of usage the laptop overheats quiet a lot and battery usage barely lasts (1hr with the internal battery).

Is this only fixable if gpu passthrough is established (and what’s the progress on it)? Or are there any tips to help with battery life and cpu usage? (For info I’m just using the usual Qubes install, usually have 3 debian VMs running)

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Welcome :slight_smile:

I have a thinkpad X1 carbon (gen 5) and the battery lasts 2-3 hours max with average 10 VMs running (with archlinux it used to last 13h). So Qubes is pretty demanding in terms of battery life from what I’ve experienced.

In my case the only things that significantly degrade more the lifetime is watching videos (the fan blasts) and for some reason when I use the Tor browser (but only sometimes).

For info I’m just using the usual Qubes install, usually have 3 debian VMs running

Have you tracked down which process in these VMs is responsible for the high cpu usage?

I’ve had some limited luck using TLP and Powertop, and making sure to notify running VMs of the power stat so they can also go into a more conservative state. (There’s a couple of threads on the old google groups about this, though to be honest I’m not sure how much any of it actually helped).

For the T480 specifically you can also work around the problem with the large secondary battery (it’s a little bulkier but totally worth getting 6+ hrs and all the Qubes goodness)

This may be related to this known issue involving thinkpad battery threshold

A post was split to a new topic: TorBrowser high cpu usage while idle, in whonix

In my case the only things that significantly degrade more the lifetime is watching videos (the fan blasts)

For watching videos in VMs, unfortunately software decoding uses a lot of cpu, but I’ve found these help a lot:

  • disable hardware acceleration in the browser
  • mpv --profile=sw-fast --vo=x11
  • use streamlink to view streams in mpv instead of the browser
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How did you install tlp when dom0 can’t connect to the Internet and it needs acpi-call (akmod-acpi_call specifically)? I also use a T480.

No need to install TLP with current kernels…

[user@dom0 ~]$ cat battery_thresholds.sh 
#! /usr/bin/bash
echo -n "Start Charging BAT0 at: " ; echo 55 | sudo tee /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_start_threshold
echo -n "Stop Charging BAT0 at:  " ; echo 65 | sudo tee /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold
echo -n "Start Charging BAT1 at: " ; echo 55 | sudo tee /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_start_threshold
echo -n "Stop Charging BAT1 at:  " ; echo 65 | sudo tee /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_end_threshold

I’ll be next to some outlet most of the time, so you have a point. I could also get another external battery. I have changed the thresholds so they’re between 50 to 80. My problem with thresholds is if I unplug it once while it exceeds the “start” threshold, I have to wait until it goes back to the starting value to charge, even if I plug it back in. Or I temporarily make the threshold higher so it starts charging again. This one is easy with a command or script, although I’d have to remember to change it later or automate it.

I would still like to know how to install acpi_call though.