Recently I have started monitoring my laptop power consumption with powertop and tuning it with tlp. My laptop is a big and bulky Dell Precision M4800, but anyway I was able to reach 15-18W consumption in a typing/reading mode, which gives me 5-6 hours of working with 97 Wh battery which is GOOD! 90% of time I use it on docked and plugged to AC.
I use Debian Sid and did full upgrade/dist-upgrade a couple of days ago.
Straight to the problem. Since I look at powertop quite often now I see some strange things there.
1. eno1 ethernet adapter. Consumes around 20W, when docked on AC and still consumes from 1-2 to 10-12 W when undocked on battery, even if I am connected using wlan card. I turn it off using ifconfig, but I guess I need some kind of script or combining it with tlp, because for me in 99.99% cases using battery = not docked = not using ethernet, so it better be automatically turned off when not on AC.
2. wlp3s0 wlan adapter. Turned OFF with hardware switch atm, but consumes 1.3W when I am writing this. And may consume up to 20W still being turned off. When on battery and connected to my home wifi (2-4 meters away) it may consume from 1-3 W when idle (which is okay) and up to 10-11 W when loading sites.
3. ExpressCard triple USB 3.0 controller is warm too, so it obviously consumes 2-3 W (lspci output for it 09:00.0 USB controller: Fresco Logic FL1100 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 10)). My left palm is right upon it and I feel it being warm when on AC, it's cold when on battery. but I really wanted to discover it and its consumption or power control in the system.
I run Debian Sid and did full upgrade couple of days ago.
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uname -a
Linux sche91-dell-m4800 6.0.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.0.8-1 (2022-11-11) x86_64 GNU/Linux