i’ve run qubes on a variety of thinkpad laptops historically, and i’m having unusually high power draw on this thinkpad t480 i recently started using, e.g. 0-12 W showing in powertop next to “Audio codec hwC0D0: Realtek (pulseaudio)”. for comparison, cpu and display backlight typically use 6-12 W, so pulseaudio can consume more energy than the rest of the processes on the machine. this occurs while there is no audio playing as well. right now, i am seeing 5.84 W used by pulseaudio and 11 W used by cpu and backlight.
this machine is running qubes 4.1.2 and i have added the grub xen flag “cpufreq=xen:hwp” to enable frequency scaling and p-states. in the bios i have disabled the microphone and camera, in addition to physically unplugging the connector to those components.
i cannot figure out how to stop this runaway power usage by pulseaudio. if i manually kill pulseaudio in appvms, the process stays off, but if i do similarly in dom0, it just restarts.
i would appreciate some help stopping the pulseaudio process in dom0 to try to get the power draw to drop.
last time i tried the 4.2 installer a few months ago, it didn’t work properly with custom disk setup. i have manually setup my disk encryption options with qubes for nearly 10 years now, so this was a showstopper when i tried to upgrade another machine. when i say upgrade here, i mean backup, fresh install, and then restore. i will give it another go this week.
i’ve looked into this problem more closely and it would appear the issue is related to the audio device and driver somehow. the audio device is a realtek ALC3287, but the generic driver, snd_hda_intel, recognizes it as ALC257 and i see no way to change this.
i saw claims that issues with this device could be fixed by sof-firmware. ends up i already had it installed and it’s still not working.
Maybe you can try to use the newer firmware. You can try to download the newer sof-firmware package version for latest Fedora and copy the new firmware files to dom0.