Comment 225 for bug 760131

Hello,

I have a thinkpad x200 (sandy bridge), and I don't think my experience is very typical, but: I saw some of the same power regressions people are talking about, but I stuck with the latter kernels (I'm using 3.0.4 from the mainline site) because the older, energy-saving kernels had some trouble with the sandy bridge chip.

In any case, I was using Natty+Gnome Classic, but a few days I decided to take the plunge and update to Oneiric+Unity, and low and behold, I'm seeing *much better* power performance *with the same kernel I was using before*. With Natty, I could barely get power consumption down to maybe 13 W (no bluetooth or network, etc). As I write this, with bluetooth off but wifi on, the laptop is drawing ~9W, and I still have >6h to go with 65% battery. Suffering occasional unity freezes, so not everything is sunny, but...

One difference is that I set all the tunables using PowerTop, and the version that comes with Oneiric has more tunables than the previous one. Now, if I can only make them persistent over shutdowns and suspend/resume cycles...

In any case, this is just to say that in my case, not everything is about the kernel...