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als RSS Feed abonnieren📚 On a low and technical level, what causes Linux to use (statistically) more battery than Windows?
💡 Newskategorie: Linux Tipps
🔗 Quelle: reddit.com
It is known that, statistically, the battery of a laptop that runs Windows or MacOS lasts much more (even a couple of hours) than a laptop running Linux.
A friend of mine and I were wondering what are the causes of this behavior.
We have not found a definitive explanation that goes into low-level detail, and we would love if someone could enlighten us.
In this brief post we will describe some of findings... We would really like to discuss them.
There might be mistakes: any correction is welcome.
The ACPI standard [1] dictates where the ACPI tables should be stored in memory. The BIOS/UEFI is responsible for loading such tables. An OS can later access these tables (reading and writing some values) and perform various power management work.
In our understanding, it seems that laptop vendors often ignore parts of the standard: they work together with Microsoft or Apple to define some "secret" location where to store some custom ACPI tables designated to carry out advanced functionalities.
Some questions:
- Does this all mean that Linux typically isn't able to regulates all ACPI states (power, processor, performance)?
- Why would the vendor do so?
- If the standard is not respected, how does Linux avoid a crash when it parse the ACPI tables and encounters errors?
Suppose that a vendor respects the ACPI standard and correctly implements it.
- In this scenario, has anyone tested whether the battery lasts equally with Windows, MacOS and Linux?
- If they do not last equally, what "custom" ACPI functionalities do Windows or MacOS implement that make the laptop last longer?
Suppose that the problem is not ACPI but Linux:
- Why haven't Linux kernel programmers yet resolved these issues? We say this because, in our opinion, it should be essential that an OS (a kernel, in reality) that proposes itself as an alternative to Windows and MacOS has an equal battery usage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Configuration_and_Power_Interface
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