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> Well, I've been perfectly happy with the "ancient" power management of my computers. It took a decade or two until suspend/resume actually _worked_ most of th
by deaddodo 4y ago
> Well, I've been perfectly happy with the "ancient" power management of my computers. It took a decade or two until suspend/resume actually _worked_ most of the time, and now all of that has been swapped out wholesale by a set of states that are at least an order of magnitude more complicated.
This. I want suspend/deep sleep. I don't mind slow wake; and I definitely don't want bluetooth, wifi, etc running while it's supposed to be idle. 90% of the issues with Windows on Laptops waking and causing them to overheat in backpacks is because of this bullshit half-sleep/smart-sleep they've started adding and forcing users to live with.
At least let me, as an informed person, choose to allow my laptop to suspend still.
- astrange 4y agoThere’s no cost to “bluetooth wifi etc” being on and not doing anything unless you’re operating an RF chamber or have the security needs of a head of state. It doesn’t significantly affect battery life; any time in your own life you’ve spent thinking about this would be better spent playing with your dog, or getting a dog so you can play with it.
- wtallis 4y agoKeeping WiFi and BT on usually means you're keeping the PCIe and USB links on (or at least waking up frequently), which means you're also preventing the processor from staying in a low-power state where all the IO is power-gated. Once the display is powered off, getting the rest of the components to be properly asleep can reduce idle power by another order of magnitude.
- astrange 4y ago“On” is a UI state though; the actual power state of the hardware is up to it, and its idle power usage can be managed by things like offloading idle tasks to the wifi SoC so they don’t have to communicate with the rest of the machine. That’s more well known for performance (where faster Ethernet interfaces do increasingly more offloading) but it works for power savings too.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoYeah, if you're offloading things to the wifi SoC, then you're giving it more power than I want to be spending when the machine is supposed to be asleep.
- astrange 4y agoThe power use could be something like less than 1% battery a day though - I have smart home thermostats that are “on the network” all the time but run on battery for months, and that’s a much smaller battery. That’s a reasonable thing to think about if you’re a wifi driver engineer. It’s not reasonable if you’re a hobbyist responsible for a single install in one laptop. It’s not really advancing the state of the art here.
- wtallis 4y agoIt sounds like you're speaking mostly about how hardware could work, without regard to how current PC hardware actually does work.
- astrange 4y agoThis is how the laptops being discussed in the article actually do work. If PCs don’t work that way complain to Broadcom or nearest motherboard OEM. They have much worse problems though, like only just getting efficiency cores.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deaddodo 4y agoNo, but what it does do is randomly wake the laptop when it runs across an Access Point it recognizes or when a BT device randomly wants to wake it. What you're describing as the ideal is what I can already get if they would just re-enable true S3 or S4. That is the state I want, not their glorified hybrid S1. If you want it, go for it; no one is saying remove it, just re-enable S3/S4.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago> I want suspend/deep sleep. I don't mind slow wake Also, you don't need to keep the machine actually awake to wake up fast; I have laptops that are... more than a decade old now, that wake so fast from S3 that they're active by the time you get the lid open.
- aeyes 4y agoThe other 10% is probably auto update thinking that it would be a good idea to wake up my machine in the middle of the night to install updates.