I was given a MacBook Pro 2009 laptop where the screen does not work anymore. I suspect it's not the screen itself but the connection to the motherboard which is broken, since it's the hinge which got the shock and has visible damage.
Anyway I am setting this up as a home server, currently running a VPN server and with more plans for future.
And I want to decrease as much as possible the idle consumption, since the machine is going to be up near 100% of the year, and also to reduce the noise it makes (it's located on the desk where I work).
I have tried tlp (works well) and I'm now going more manually by running commands in /etc/rc.local to enable power saving settings. In both case I hit a plateau where I cant reduce the consumption below 17-18W (which is a lot compared to nowadays machines), with this strange result : here are the first few lines of powertop
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The battery reports a discharge rate of 17.4 W
The power consumed was 342 J
The estimated remaining time is 2 hours, 17 minutes
Summary: 283.7 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 1.6% CPU use
Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description
11.5 W 0.0% Device Display backlight
4.77 W 2.0 pkts/s Device Network interface: enp0s10 (forcedeth)
1.31 W 0.0 pkts/s Device Network interface: wlp4s0 (wl)
1.07 W 0.0 pkts/s Device nic:tun0
So the display backlight consumes a lot of power, even though the screen doesnt work, the lid is closed, and I have set the brightness to zero (with
echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/gmux_backlight/brightness
, and the brightness does appear with usage 0% in the "Device stats" tab of powertop). How can I cut this down ?If I could cut down 10W of consumption, that would be fantastic.
More minor : the wireless wlp4s0 also consumes power, but I have no use to it since the laptop is connected by ethernet. I have set it's power management (in powertop the line "Runtime PM for PCI Device Broadcom Limited BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller" is good), and shut it off with
sudo ifconfig wlp4s0 down
, but the powertop line remains the same around 1W. If anybody knows how to cut this down, that would also be a significant saving.