Tips to extend your laptop's battery on Linux Intel

We've been discussing the battery problems experienced by some users of Linux distributions ,Especially in the case of those who kernel 2.6.38 feature. The duration of these batteries can be significantly reduced in that case, even with newer kernels 3.0 and future 3.1-.

Here offers some tips to not only solve that problem, but for our laptops even more efficient power consumption, and focus, though, the users of laptops with Intel chips (Both CPU and GPU), and the new Sandy Bridge. Here are the tips:

• Enable ASPM: Add "pcie_aspm=force" in boot arguments in our kernel will allow us to ensure that the problem with kernels that disable ASPM serial off the main problem of kernel 2.6.38 - disappears..

• i915.i915_enable_rc6=1: This feature allows the GPU into a state of low power consumption when the GPU is idle without work.
• i915.i915_enable_fbc=1: This option enables the kernel called FBC (Frame-Buffer Compression) for Intel graphics controllers. It uses less bandwidth, memory, and this contributes to lower power consumption.
• i915.lvds_downclock=1: The LVDS clock frequency may also be reduced and save energy, but on systems that do not support LVDS complete this may cause an annoying flicker on the screen.

These options can be add to the boot loader GRUP in the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg to be permanent, or can be passed by hand to load the i915 module in case of counting on such chips. If you do not use the Intel graphics driver for Linux these changes will not offer any improvement in the autonomy of your battery.

The tests conducted that did possess such GPUs and showed that indeed the battery consumption with these options enabled can make significant improvements in various scenarios, so if you have a laptop with Intel GPU, try it.