According to $ powertop
, the WiFi card (Intel Wifi 6 AX201) in my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen9 (running Ubuntu 21.04) is often drawing between 4 and 5W in battery mode, thereby reducing my laptop's battery life by several hours. This happens while my laptop is connected to a wifi network and even when there's little to no traffic occurring on the wifi interface.
I find this incredible, given that I've been using Intel Wifi cards in other laptops over the years and none of them have drawn that much power.
Is there any way for me to reduce the wifi card's power consumption? The Intel docs mention different power modes (max performance/medium power saving/max power saving) and I'm wondering how to switch between those.
Some diagnostic info:
$ lspci | grep -i "wi-fi" 130 ↵
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wi-Fi 6 AX201 (rev 20)
cat /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf
[connection]
# Values are 0 (use default), 1 (ignore/don't touch), 2 (disable) or 3 (enable).
wifi.powersave = 3
(Accordingly, iwconfig
shows "Power Management:on" for the wifi interface.)
ThinkWiki mentions there being a file /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:00:14.3/power_level
but the file doesn't exist on my system. The only thing I've found is:
$ cat /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:00:14.3/power_state
D0
(Not sure what this means)
At the same time, iwpriv
also doesn't show any driver-specific parameters that I could set:
$ iwpriv wlp0s20f3
wlp0s20f3 no private ioctls.
iwlwifi
, if not, please state which module handles the ax201.$ lspci -v
the kernel driver used by the WiFi card is indeediwlwifi
.