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Description of problem: Filed under powertop, but likely not its fault. Powertop is showing two audio codecs (hwC0D3: Intel & Realtek) at 100% usage when I'm not running any audio. This is on a Lenovo T530; the fan is spinning gently. If I run a video via vlc the Realtek item goes away (the Intel remains). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Powertop 2.4 3.11.8-300.fc20.x86_64 How reproducible: Only noticed today, but the fan's been spinning all morning. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot system 2. Note niggling fan noise 3. Install powertop Actual results: Codecs apparently spinning Expected results: Quiet fan Additional info: PowerTOP 2.4 Overview Idle stats Frequency stats Device stats Tunable Summary: 460.7 wakeups/second, 49.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 4.1% CPU Usage Events/s Category Description 27.0 ms/s 380.4 Process /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox 100.0% Device Audio codec hwC0D0: Realtek 100.0% Device Audio codec hwC0D3: Intel 960.5 rpm Device Laptop fan 10.6 ms/s 24.3 Process /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -backgroun
Can you fix it in the "Tunables" tab, by enabling the "audio codec power management"?
This can typically save you less than 1 W of power. But this shouldn't make your fan busy. I guess your problem is elsewhere, e.g. kernel/io load or from the above log, the firefox. The 380.4 wake ups is quite a lot.
Turning on power-control of the audio codecs does remove them from the list, so the bug title is wrong. Sorry about the noise. Taking out one specific tab from firefox dropped the firefox events down to 40/sec. However, the fan noise remains (there's a trickle of warm air from the exhaust so I'm fairly sure it's not the disk!). Current: Summary: 68.7 wakeups/second, 3.6 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 0.8% CPU u Usage Events/s Category Description 4.6 ms/s 29.7 Process /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox 489.0 us/s 9.7 Process xchat 191.1 us/s 6.5 Process [irq/46-iwlwifi] 179.3 us/s 5.7 Timer tick_sched_timer The fan line comes and goes, sometimes at ~1900rpm, sometimes 900.
Ok, thanks for the info. The powertop tunables are temporal (till next boot), if you want to make them permanent, you can try to use the "tuned". In the default "balanced" profile the audi codecs are handled out of the box. For the other powertop tunings, there is included powertop2tuned utililty. Regarding your problem, I think this can be kernel. Check your loads, by e.g. top / uptime, etc. If it is high, it is probably some "driver" problem. In such case, please create new bug against kernel. There is nothing to fix in the powertop, thus closing this BZ.