It works, but battery life is lower

Well, I have been using my laptop with FreeBSD for about week since making a few adjustments to it, and I've reached the conclusion that at least part of my problem may lie with the fact that the battery I'm using now is an aftermarket one I got online a few months back, and most likely its quality isn't as good the one that originally came with the factory with my laptop back in 2018.

At any rate, I don't consider my suspected battery life issue to be a huge problem, because my ultimate goal is get FreeBSD working on my desktop, and at the moment I'm just trying it out temporarily on my old laptop.

Also, I was able to solve a few problems this week, such as getting my laptop to reliably mount USB thumb and DVDROM drives, but I'm having some minor difficulties with some of my shortcuts pointing to the folders where these devices are mounted. I created two shortcuts on my desktop, which are able to display to display the content on the newly mounted drives, and these two shortcuts work perfectly.

However, the shortcuts contained within the device area of the Thunar file manager do not seem to function properly whenever I attempt to click on them. It would be nice to get them to work, but I guess it is not absolutely necessary. I'm just glad that I can read and write to and from a USB drive.

Additionally, I was able to finally get the volume control working for the headphone jack, but I cannot remember exactly what I did to make it work.

Also, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to start an entirely new thread for this next question, or if I can add it on here, but I will try anyway. I've noticed that the line in my fstab file referencing my usb drive mentions MSDOS. However, I have a few external hard drives (WD My Book) which I have formatted to NTFS. Will I have to create a new mounting folder, and a new line in fstab file in order to use these external drives with FreeBSD.

Sorry, I couldn't figure out how to use the function to copy and paste code, I will figure it out later.
 

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GlitchyDot said:
I noted battery life shorter on zfs and better on ufs ( maybe tinfoil hat moment) so im back on ufs.
This my rc.conf
Code: 
powerd_flags="-a hiadaptive -b adaptive"
performance_cx_lowest="Cmax"
economy_cx_lowest="Cmax"
kld_list="acpi_video"
ahci_load="YES"
Also i have ThinkPad T480 i7-8650U motherboard
my /etc/sysctl.conf contains hw.acpi.video.lcd0.brightness=30
I have 2 batteries up to 12h of battery life for my use case.
While im typing now - my laptopt uses 6.50W-7.20W 2tabs of fifefox and Alacritty terminal open.
If i do nothing, nothing is open - once screen blanks out it uses 2.7W
I dont know if my rc.conf is correct never checked with the lads on FreeBSD.
Also i have ibm module loaded so i could use my 2 batteries in one go.
Still not configured usb power when nothing is attached to them.
/boot/loader.conf
compat.linuxkpi_enable_dc=2
compat.linuxkpi.enable_fbc=1
hw.pci.do_power_nodriver="3"

hw.pci.do_power_nodriver (Defaults to 0)
Place devices into a low power state (D3) when a suitable de-
vice driver is not found. Can be set to one of the following
values:

3 Powers down all PCI devices without a device driver.

2 Powers down most devices without a device driver. PCI
devices with the display, memory, and base peripheral
device classes are not powered down.

1 Similar to a setting of 2 except that storage con-
trollers are also not powered down.

0 All devices are left fully powered.

A PCI device must support power management to be powered down.
Placing a device into a low power state may not reduce power
consumption.
Click to expand...
I'm using UFS on my particular machine. Also, come to think of it, I think that my battery life is substantially better when I'm using an ethernet cable instead of wifi. But, maybe I'm also have a tinfoil hat moment due to being new to all of this.
 
Cedric62 said:
I'm using UFS on my particular machine. Also, come to think of it, I think that my battery life is substantially better when I'm using an ethernet cable instead of wifi. But, maybe I'm also have a tinfoil hat moment due to being new to all of this.
Click to expand...
I did some measurements in that regard, you may start here.
 
Cedric62 said:
… the device area of the Thunar …
Click to expand...

forums.freebsd.org

Thunar: Devices

… FreeBSD 14.1 and Xfce … … shortcuts contained within the device area of the Thunar file manager do not seem to function properly … … UFS … Cedric62 I see your screenshots, but I can't tell what happens with File System. File System works for me, with ZFS. % pkg iinfo thunar...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
Crivens said:
I did some measurements in that regard, you may start here.
Click to expand...
This is awesome!
I have AX200 - so i might switch to cable even if its mostly same as AX200 is so bad :(
I ve 2 machines running FreeBSD 14.1
Pic attached is FreeBSD 14.1-Release on my gaming rig with cable and run test on laptop - barely got 30-40.
Also my internet is with sim card netgear m1 so dont expect runnin 1Gbps lol.


Cedric62 said:
Well, I have been using my laptop with FreeBSD for about week since making a few adjustments to it, and I've reached the conclusion that at least part of my problem may lie with the fact that the battery I'm using now is an aftermarket one I got online a few months back, and most likely its quality isn't as good the one that originally came with the factory with my laptop back in 2018.
Click to expand...
I would check OG battery capacity and aftermarket. maybe its smaller in capacity also i never had issues with aftermarket bats dies quicker due to being aftermarket but i have experience only with Thinkpad`s.

Back on with power - i did my fresh zfs install on same laptop - idle is only 0.3w higher with exact same configs.
 

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Hello everyone,

I am also trying out FreeBSD on a laptop and looking to improve battery life. My CPU is AMD Ryzen 7 5700U with Radeon Graphics.

One of the things I changed on a Linux install is to load the amd-pstate kernel driver to lower the idle CPU frequencies. The main change would be the minimum frequencies for idle cores would be at 400 MHz instead of 1400 MHz. I looked into it a bit on powerd but I was not able to find the scaling down of frequencies until 400 MHz. I am also not too knowledgeable on this topic of managing CPU freqs, scheduling and governors. Anyone knows if this is possible on FreeBSD? Do I need to install an extra package like
sysutils/cpu-microcode-amd?

I want to install a Wayland Hyprland WM and run some more tests on idle consumption. As a base rate, my Ubuntu KDE neon at a idle state (with a few programs open) runs at 12W.
 
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