5 ms·

I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. The processor is very power efficient, but I'd (naively) assume that MacOS

I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. The processor is very power efficient, but I'd (naively) assume that MacOS's power management probably has a big influence too. In the same way that Linux laptops usually have a bad battery life compared to the same hardware on Windows. How good is Asahi when running similar workloads? And is it possible that it could reach parity with "stock" MacOS? (I'm sure linux is in theory just as power efficient as MacOS or Windows, but distros are just usually not very concerned or capable of tuning it well enough.)

rektide 4y ago
Installing Linux has had huge wins for me for power usage. Running powertop --auto-tune helps a good bit. I used to fiddle forever but this gets like 80% of the wins. Things like "do we reduce power state of sata links" used to be extremely conservatively set, for fear of really old hardware from the beginning of sata era that behaved badly, but was an obvious &bhige win for 99.999999% of folk. Linux has finally started turning a bunch of these baseline expected tuning on by default, across the past few years (rather than powertop doing it), so the out of box experience is finally much more reasonable. It's been like this forever but people love throwing shade. I had a Transmeta Crusoe laptop (p1120) amd yes, at first battery life was worde. But I did low hanging fruit optimizations, and Linux got better, and soon I had like an hour more runtime on Linux. Mac famously has a trashburger IO subsystem, so not having that boat anchor hanging off the side should probably let the system hurry-up-and-idle better, saving power.
- pxc 4y ago
  powertop is way underrated. You don't have to know much to get a lot out of it safely.
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  I don't understand why the powertop tunings aren't the default when the distro detects it's running on a laptop.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    The most annoying thing that prevents me from running --auto-tune on bootup is that there's no way to exclude USB devices. So if I boot when docked, the mouse will stop working when I don't move it for a few seconds and I need to click to make it work again. And no, unplugging it once is not an acceptable solution.
    - rektide 4y ago
      It just got added in 2023, but there's now --auto-tune-dump which generates a command line invocation of powertop that would set all the auto-tune settings. Instead of running --auto-tune, you can make a script of this dump, modify it to your contentment, and run the script instead of auto-tune at startup. So you can omit your mouse! Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain device or subsystem tunings from auto-tune as well. Personally I think it'd be fun to mess around with more advanced schemes, where we dynamically alter powersaving behaviors based on user behavior. What we have now seems somewhat unresponsive. It'd be fun to dive into. https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116 https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116
      - iforgotpassword 4y ago
        Awesome! Yes, I was thinking about doing this manually by toggling every setting manually and copying the command being displayed but gave up quite quickly as it was too cumbersome. Sometimes the screen would refresh before you copied so you had to do it again... This option solves that nicely.
- psychoslave 4y ago
  I wasn't wasn't of this, thanks
pleb_nz 4y ago
I think it'll be the same on the MacBook pro 14 m1, at least for some people like myself. I had a Lenovo p15 with an Intel chip running fedora before my m1 MacBook and I got roughly the same life during the same working day between the two.
coldtea 4y ago
>I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. Not 100% the same, but the Asahi members reported something like 8 hours on a M1 Macbook, so that's better than most/all x86 laptops with Linux
- t-3 4y ago
  Better than high performance mobile workstations, sure, but I was getting 10-12 hour battery off a macbook air running Gentoo nearly a decade ago. PBP gets 10+ hours. $25 scrap latitude with ~70% peak capacity gets 6-8 hours.
  - apatheticonion 4y ago
    I actually think you're onto something with this. When I run compilation workloads on my M1 MBP, I get 3-4 hours battery life. VMs and games (crossover) also bring my battery life down to 4-6 hours. My old intel MBP would get around the same battery life when doing the same workloads (games under bootcamp Windows), it would get worse battery life sitting idle or for optimised workloads (like video playback). Mixed workloads, I get maybe 2-3 hours more with my M1 laptop. That's not nothing, but it's not the crazy 18 hours battery life in the marketing material
    - ILMostro7 4y ago
      18 hours battery life is mostly marketing. Not even sure how to test that, maybe on 20% display brightness with no programs running, other than the OS...assuming it doesn't take screenlock/display off into account?
      - mardifoufs 4y ago
        I remember reviews on youtube that showed the macbook air/pro M1 playing video (streaming?) for that long. Actually, it kept going for 20h. https://youtu.be/KE-hrWTgDjk?t=645 https://youtu.be/KE-hrWTgDjk?t=645
16 4y ago
Battery life is significantly worse on my m1 pro macbook pro under asahi. I'd estimate about half of MacOS.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Is it worse across the board? Is idle power consumption higher, or is it mostly when under load that it gets worse?
  - shaunsingh0207 4y ago
    I find under load its the same, idle power consumption is higher. It seems linux doesn't have the same level of delegation on powerformance/effeciency cores that apple manages with macOS
somethoughts 4y ago
I think the key difference (hopefully) will be that there are a limited number of hardware configurations for Mac. Still a lot (i.e. 100+ SKUs) but not nearly the number of x86 hardware configurations (i.e 10000+) Also presumably if Apple wants this to happen, they as a single vendor can provide a single definitive answer on what they are doing for each configuration. Eventually... In the x86 world, there is Intel, AMD and like 50 different manufacturers each with a particular HW implementation/BIOS customization, leading to IntelAMDHardware_Vendor_customizations^50 permutations that'd need to be validated.
- jorvi 4y ago
  It’s been a while since I’be owned a MacBook, but the speakers sounded significantly worse on Linux (and if you own a MacBook you know they can sound pretty decent) because they are EQ’d in macOS, not the speaker firmware. Never has there been any effort taken within Linux to apply a generalstic ‘small speaker EQ’ to anything with detected internal speakers. Similarly, the Linux kernel by default is optimized for server style workloads (throughput) instead of smoothness. It would be so easy to check for an internal battery and if true apply a few kernel parameters so your laptop stays smooth under load. Linux as a desktop (well, laptop) OS is terrible not because it is incapable of being great at it, but because people don’t seem to care for the death-by-a-thousand-cuts issues.
  - jnsaff2 4y ago
    There was even an article[0] about the sound of macbook speakers quite recently. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34935483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34935483
  - kerneis 4y ago
    The asahi project is working on improving speaker support: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109914949041457536 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109914949041457536 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
linmob 4y ago
I used my M1 MacBook Air last weekend with Asahi and GNOME on train ride for roughly 4 hours (browsing the web, fiddling with a server over ssh, writing a blog post) and when shutting it down, it was still at 78%. This used to be different when I first installed Asahi, but the GPU driver and other improvements have made battery life something I don't really worry about anymore.
- paines 4y ago
  thank you for that report. This convinced me to install it now.
  - biomcgary 4y ago
    The only thing holding me back from running Asahi is lack of HDMI output (at least on M1 Airs). Has anyone heard about progress (or its likelihood) recently?
    - paines 4y ago
      I tried it just now on M1 14'': nothing...
  - paines 4y ago
    Actually it works quite nicely on a M1 14''. Even battery life is quite good. Compared to my Dell XPS 15 7590 it has twice the battery life, easily if not even more. One thing which bothers me a lot as it makes the laptop hardly useable for me at night: display brightness cannot be adjusted, it is either off or 100%. Some user claim this can be accomplished by installing the asahi-edge kernel, which does not even boot for me. And this also bothers me lot: why are things checked in/distributed which do not work at all in Asahi Arch?!?! If you install e.g. a dev kernel which does not boot because the NVME driver is broken and you do not have a fallback kernel you are doomed. You cannot mount the partition in macOS to fix this manually.
    - paines 4y ago
      Okay, one step further, and one step back: installing the asahi-edge kernel requires the mesa-asahi-egde package otherwise you won't see a thing. This isn't been done automatically. Now brightness works which is fine, but working e.g. with raylib which will create a GLX context fails now with mesa-edge...

rektide 4y ago

Installing Linux has had huge wins for me for power usage. Running powertop --auto-tune helps a good bit. I used to fiddle forever but this gets like 80% of the wins. Things like "do we reduce power state of sata links" used to be extremely conservatively set, for fear of really old hardware from the beginning of sata era that behaved badly, but was an obvious &bhige win for 99.999999% of folk. Linux has finally started turning a bunch of these baseline expected tuning on by default, across the past few years (rather than powertop doing it), so the out of box experience is finally much more reasonable. It's been like this forever but people love throwing shade. I had a Transmeta Crusoe laptop (p1120) amd yes, at first battery life was worde. But I did low hanging fruit optimizations, and Linux got better, and soon I had like an hour more runtime on Linux. Mac famously has a trashburger IO subsystem, so not having that boat anchor hanging off the side should probably let the system hurry-up-and-idle better, saving power.

pxc 4y ago
powertop is way underrated. You don't have to know much to get a lot out of it safely.
FooBarWidget 4y ago
I don't understand why the powertop tunings aren't the default when the distro detects it's running on a laptop.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  The most annoying thing that prevents me from running --auto-tune on bootup is that there's no way to exclude USB devices. So if I boot when docked, the mouse will stop working when I don't move it for a few seconds and I need to click to make it work again. And no, unplugging it once is not an acceptable solution.
  - rektide 4y ago
    It just got added in 2023, but there's now --auto-tune-dump which generates a command line invocation of powertop that would set all the auto-tune settings. Instead of running --auto-tune, you can make a script of this dump, modify it to your contentment, and run the script instead of auto-tune at startup. So you can omit your mouse! Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain device or subsystem tunings from auto-tune as well. Personally I think it'd be fun to mess around with more advanced schemes, where we dynamically alter powersaving behaviors based on user behavior. What we have now seems somewhat unresponsive. It'd be fun to dive into. https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116 https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116
    - iforgotpassword 4y ago
      Awesome! Yes, I was thinking about doing this manually by toggling every setting manually and copying the command being displayed but gave up quite quickly as it was too cumbersome. Sometimes the screen would refresh before you copied so you had to do it again... This option solves that nicely.
psychoslave 4y ago
I wasn't wasn't of this, thanks

pleb_nz 4y ago

I think it'll be the same on the MacBook pro 14 m1, at least for some people like myself. I had a Lenovo p15 with an Intel chip running fedora before my m1 MacBook and I got roughly the same life during the same working day between the two.

coldtea 4y ago

>I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. Not 100% the same, but the Asahi members reported something like 8 hours on a M1 Macbook, so that's better than most/all x86 laptops with Linux

t-3 4y ago
Better than high performance mobile workstations, sure, but I was getting 10-12 hour battery off a macbook air running Gentoo nearly a decade ago. PBP gets 10+ hours. $25 scrap latitude with ~70% peak capacity gets 6-8 hours.
- apatheticonion 4y ago
  I actually think you're onto something with this. When I run compilation workloads on my M1 MBP, I get 3-4 hours battery life. VMs and games (crossover) also bring my battery life down to 4-6 hours. My old intel MBP would get around the same battery life when doing the same workloads (games under bootcamp Windows), it would get worse battery life sitting idle or for optimised workloads (like video playback). Mixed workloads, I get maybe 2-3 hours more with my M1 laptop. That's not nothing, but it's not the crazy 18 hours battery life in the marketing material
  - ILMostro7 4y ago
    18 hours battery life is mostly marketing. Not even sure how to test that, maybe on 20% display brightness with no programs running, other than the OS...assuming it doesn't take screenlock/display off into account?
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      I remember reviews on youtube that showed the macbook air/pro M1 playing video (streaming?) for that long. Actually, it kept going for 20h. https://youtu.be/KE-hrWTgDjk?t=645 https://youtu.be/KE-hrWTgDjk?t=645

16 4y ago

Battery life is significantly worse on my m1 pro macbook pro under asahi. I'd estimate about half of MacOS.

mardifoufs 4y ago
Is it worse across the board? Is idle power consumption higher, or is it mostly when under load that it gets worse?
- shaunsingh0207 4y ago
  I find under load its the same, idle power consumption is higher. It seems linux doesn't have the same level of delegation on powerformance/effeciency cores that apple manages with macOS

somethoughts 4y ago

I think the key difference (hopefully) will be that there are a limited number of hardware configurations for Mac. Still a lot (i.e. 100+ SKUs) but not nearly the number of x86 hardware configurations (i.e 10000+) Also presumably if Apple wants this to happen, they as a single vendor can provide a single definitive answer on what they are doing for each configuration. Eventually... In the x86 world, there is Intel, AMD and like 50 different manufacturers each with a particular HW implementation/BIOS customization, leading to IntelAMDHardware_Vendor_customizations^50 permutations that'd need to be validated.

jorvi 4y ago
It’s been a while since I’be owned a MacBook, but the speakers sounded significantly worse on Linux (and if you own a MacBook you know they can sound pretty decent) because they are EQ’d in macOS, not the speaker firmware. Never has there been any effort taken within Linux to apply a generalstic ‘small speaker EQ’ to anything with detected internal speakers. Similarly, the Linux kernel by default is optimized for server style workloads (throughput) instead of smoothness. It would be so easy to check for an internal battery and if true apply a few kernel parameters so your laptop stays smooth under load. Linux as a desktop (well, laptop) OS is terrible not because it is incapable of being great at it, but because people don’t seem to care for the death-by-a-thousand-cuts issues.
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  There was even an article[0] about the sound of macbook speakers quite recently. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34935483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34935483
- kerneis 4y ago
  The asahi project is working on improving speaker support: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109914949041457536 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109914949041457536 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968
AnthonyMouse 4y ago

linmob 4y ago

I used my M1 MacBook Air last weekend with Asahi and GNOME on train ride for roughly 4 hours (browsing the web, fiddling with a server over ssh, writing a blog post) and when shutting it down, it was still at 78%. This used to be different when I first installed Asahi, but the GPU driver and other improvements have made battery life something I don't really worry about anymore.

paines 4y ago
thank you for that report. This convinced me to install it now.
- biomcgary 4y ago
  The only thing holding me back from running Asahi is lack of HDMI output (at least on M1 Airs). Has anyone heard about progress (or its likelihood) recently?
  - paines 4y ago
    I tried it just now on M1 14'': nothing...
- paines 4y ago
  Actually it works quite nicely on a M1 14''. Even battery life is quite good. Compared to my Dell XPS 15 7590 it has twice the battery life, easily if not even more. One thing which bothers me a lot as it makes the laptop hardly useable for me at night: display brightness cannot be adjusted, it is either off or 100%. Some user claim this can be accomplished by installing the asahi-edge kernel, which does not even boot for me. And this also bothers me lot: why are things checked in/distributed which do not work at all in Asahi Arch?!?! If you install e.g. a dev kernel which does not boot because the NVME driver is broken and you do not have a fallback kernel you are doomed. You cannot mount the partition in macOS to fix this manually.
  - paines 4y ago
    Okay, one step further, and one step back: installing the asahi-edge kernel requires the mesa-asahi-egde package otherwise you won't see a thing. This isn't been done automatically. Now brightness works which is fine, but working e.g. with raylib which will create a GLX context fails now with mesa-edge...