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Dear Community,

powertop is reporting quite the powerdraw due to interrupts compared to idle when I touch the touch pad (XPS 13 9315 with an Intel 12th gen CPU). Is there headroom to save power on the touch pad without loosing (much) responsiveness?

Some speculation (with a noticeable lack of knowledge on my part):

I've seen that the IRQs for the touchpad and the controller have different core affinities. Could there be power saved by not waking two cores and maybe the ringbus?

Edit: After ...

Such things are hard to tell without rigorous testing tbh. Lots of variables to control and knowledge gaps on my side....

I will mark it as solved. If someone knows how to enable the powersaving features for the iwlwifi drivers, I'd still love to know (and maybe a way to easily check if they are enabled).

Thank you for the insights!

Here is what lspci -vnn returns:
00:14.3 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P PCH CNVi WiFi [8086:51f0] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6E AX211 160MHz [8086:4090]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
Memory at 6078194000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
Kernel modules: iwlwifi


Powertop often reports 1.2 to 1.5 W, it depends a little on the network ...

Dear Community,

since I updated to the backported 6.11.x kernel and updated to the backported intel wifi drivers (because wifi wouldn't work without them), wifi (AX211) shows noticeably higher power draw in powertop. It seems that some powersaving features were disabled or do not work properly anymore.

Do you experience the same? Is there a fix?

Thanks in advance!

Chief

Thanks for your help! Installing the metapackage just worked. On the IRC it sounded like there is no metapackage, that's why I got intimidated.

In case anyone is interested, I got quite the performance uplift on my intel integrated 12th gen gpu. At least in starsector. Although it still has stutters despite quite high fps.

This is what the console returns:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
libdrm-nouveau2:i386
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following additional packages will be installed:
libdrm-amdgpu1 libdrm-amdgpu1:i386 libdrm-common libdrm-intel1
libdrm-intel1:i386 libdrm-nouveau2 libdrm-nouveau2:i386 libdrm-radeon1
libdrm-radeon1:i386 libdrm2 libdrm2 ...

Should I just check every package currently installed (via Synaptic) with the word 'mesa' in it and then list them all? The mesa has so many moving parts, will that method get everything I need?

Dear Community,

I'd like to try the new backported mesa drivers because I hope it will solve the stuttering issues I have in some games. How do I best go about upgrading my mesa?

I'm a little wary because I looked into forcing the version via Synaptic and there where some incompatibilities that looked like they could break things if I do the switch incorrectly. My GPU is Intel integrated in case that matters.

Thanks in advance on help on the matter!

Afaik, turning off C-states has next to no performance benefit on modern CPUs. There may be a very, very slight latency penalty when doing a task on an idling system, but that is probably imperceptible to normal users. I would be surprised to see a performance gain in gaming or professional compute tasks.

Thanks!

I tried finding it and failed. But that may just be incompetence...

How do I try other compositors with xfce?

Inxi returns this:

Graphics:
Device-1: Intel Alder Lake-UP4 GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] vendor: Dell
driver: i915 v: kernel arch: Gen-12.2 bus-ID: 00:02.0
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.7 driver: X: loaded: modesetting
unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: iris gpu: i915 resolution: 1920x1200~60Hz
API: OpenGL v: 4.6 Mesa 22.3.6 renderer: Mesa Intel Graphics (ADL GT2)
direct-render: Yes


I tried editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf. That seemed to do something but also produced bugs like ...

I edited /home/user/ .drirc adding:

<device screen="0" driver="dri2">
<application name="Default">
<option name="vblank_mode" value="0"/>
<option name="swapbuffers_wait" value="0"/>
<option name="triple_buffer" value="false"/>
</application>
</device>


But I don't think it worked. I filmed my screen with the camera of my cellphone (supposedly 240 Hz) and scrolled through some documents. I didn't see any tearing.

Thanks!

Do I understand correctly, that I can set the setting specifically for some applications?

Dear Community,

I'm having trouble with very inconsistent framerates in a game I recently installed. What's causing this is a little uncertain, but I'd like to try to disable vsync and triple buffering on my integrated graphics (intel i915). Could you point me in the right direction?
My install is the latest debian 12 with xfce.

Thanks in advance!

Linux Laptop 6.9.7+bpo-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.9.7-1~bpo12+1 (2024-07-03) x86_64 GNU/Linux

Sorry for the late response. I don't think it had anything to do with the kernel version.

After running an update on my packages, the problem just disappeared. It must have been an updated packet around the end of July in the stable or backport repo.

The issue has been resolved in the latest package update.

Small update: I don't think the issue is related to the Kernel. It is just my memory, but I am fairly confident that the issue did not appear with a kernel update but with a debian update. The new backported 6.9 kernel did not resolve the issue.

I'm running Debian 12.6 with a backported 6.7.12 Kernel (x86).

Dear Community,

ever since a 'recent' update on my laptop, I noticed that tick_nohz_highres_handler appears towards the top of the list in powertop.

Is this a known issue?

Thanks in advance!