Sadly, excessive power consumption takes place even when the display is off, which can be checked using the terminal or via ssh, e.g.
The XA2 Ultra in same conditions still eats several times less energy (see the next post after the one quoted above for XA2U figures). So it’s not the screen.
On the XA2 Ultra it is in /sys/class/power_supply/battery/subsystem/bms/cycle_count (as well as a few copies/symlinks of it) in other locations
but it doesn’t work (as it always contains 0).
That while loop supposed to wake the phone every second to run a process, not sure how much it contributes to power consumption as practically the phone does not go to idle mode?
You can try to change it from one second to whatever else. Note, however, that if it goes to sleep then it probably won’t give you any output for that period of time.
Anyway, as I wrote earlier, the problem is not with idle, as in that state it goes as low as 30-40 mA. The actual problem is that WHEN IN USE it is an enormous energy hog, eating 2 or even 3 times more current than the XA2 Ultra in the same conditions.
My 10 III is actually a mirror of my XA2 Ultra - same data, same applications installed, even the same SIM card (a so called “Tandem” i.e. twin SIM with the same number). In identical conditions the 10 III draws double to tripple the current the XA2U draws. All reviews of the 10 III (with stock Android onboard) give it standby and talk times several times longer than those we get under SFOS. So the problem is definitely in software.
If I understood things correctly, cores don’t just have to run at lowest frequencies, but also get disabled through S-states. Not sure how granular it is, whole cluster or individual cores.
There raising the minimum frequency might help keep other cores off. But it is a pure guess. Do S-states work on SFOS the same as on Android?
As for governor, as long as it is not performance one, idle usage should remain the same. When the device is hot or you have load spikes, there you should see gains.
Hi wetab73, I managed to reduce battery consumption by disabling WiFi at times, when I wear the phone in my trousers or lay it “display down” on a table. This might not fit for everyone, but I i think it is worth mentioning. Details see: Situations: “display down”
Could you install and run powertop on both devices and compare the wakeups displayed by powertop?
I’ll do it in some spare time. But I’m not sure what would it tell me beyond what I can see even without it. Even just Battery Buddy logs or readings from /sys/class/power_supply/battery/current_now show that the XA2 Ultra simply consumes much less energy in virtually all conditions. In sleep it manages to go as low as 11-12 mA (some 10-20% of time) averaging at 19-25 mA (70-80% of time) while the 10 III never gets below 36-40 mA and averages at 45-55 mA. On the XA2 Ultra, when it goes to sleep there are occasional spikes up to 48-62 mA (and literally a few higher but still below 100 mA), whereas on the 10 III spikes are almost always in the 120-250 mA range, and some of them even reach 300-600 mA. I’m afraid that powertop won’t show anything new in this regard.
That’s really difficult to detect, unless someone starts stopping (maybe removing) services until to find the culprit. It might not be a SFOS and the issue is in lower level binaries?
Maybe powertop can reveal the processes which consume more power and wakeup the cpus this often. Maybe there is something misconfigured in the kernel settings.
It certainly isn’t the stock Android because all 10 III reviews give it much much better battery life and talk times. It might be the AOSP, but I haven’t seen any data. With not even any LineageOS release for the 10 III so far, there isn’t much to compare…
I’ll certainly check it. But since the 10 III is now my daily driver, I’ll need to find proper time for it when I can leave it for some hours intact to collect the data.
Powertop seems to not work correctly uner SFOS when the display is off. I couldn’t generate a long time report using ssh. But for comparison just put the both phones in flight mode, close all apps and change the display settings to turn it off after 2 minutes. Start the terminal and generate a 30 second report:
sudo powertop --iteration=1 --time=30 --html=POWERREPORT.HTML
Or enable wifi and execute the command via ssh.
30 seconds should be enough for a comparison.
I have a “spare” XA2 Ultra I could try to compare with. It’s not at 4.4.0.72 but should still work for comparison purposes.
Aight, since the forum doesn’t let me upload a .zip file, let alone .html files, here they are:
It looks like X10III is a bit more efficient, but then again, the Gold Cores seem to spend their time…somewhere. I don’t have the knowledge to dissect those, so go wild!
Thank you,
only thing i noticed, that the x10iii is always using the highest clock speed of the used core. The XA2 uses only the lower frequencies.
This seems to be caused by schedutil governor. With ondemand it is also using the lower frequencies.
Sadly all this does not seem to help to find the cause of the battery drain.
OK, and here’s mine:
On the 10 III the infamous voicecall-ui -prestart seems to be eating CPU while actually doing nothing.
On a different note… Just out of curiosity, I’ve just switched all cores of the XA2 Ultra to “performance” governor, so now four cores run all the time at 2.2 GHz and the remaining four at 1.8 GHz. It made the XA2 noticeably snappier, almost as smooth as the 10 III. Power consumption has increased, but still within some 80-110 mA range, i.e. actually still lower than the 10 III… It’s been 20 minutes now and it hasn’t even lost a single % of charge.
Your XA2Ultra has a way lower wakeup count than your X10iii. Even if we subtract the wakeups caused by voicecall-ui-prestart, it is significantly higher than your XA2ultra.
Yeah, I’ve noticed it. But the question is why. Both devices are actually mirrors - same data, same software installed, and the same (i.e. nothing) running while taking the measurement.
Maybe I’ll give it a reboot and try to take the reading once more on the 10 III.
OK, here’s a new one, taken right after reboot and without activating the SIM card (it wasn’t active on the XA2 Ultra, either). Slightly less wakeups, still more than XA2 but I guess comparable.
P.S. @direc85, your 10 III still has much less wakeups. What state was it in? WLAN, cellular radio enabled or disabled? Thank you.
OK, last one, after yet another reboot, everything (WLAN, cellular radio, GPS, Bluetooth, etc) disabled:
Wakeups dropped to 192/s.
Thank you so much! The
mcetool --set-low-power-mode=enabled
command makes such a difference. Wow!
I admire all who try to improve the battery consumption!
Out of curiosity, I’ve just installed White on Black ambience (which I further tweaked to be even more monochromatic). Sadly, there is no noticeable reduction in power consumption because only the main launcher screen is really black (pixels are really turned off). Both the Events screen and backgrounds of all applications are actually grey - it is clearly visible that those grey pixels are active and backlighted. This grey color is caused by the Silica UI automatically applying some kind of effect over the black background, which in this case makes it grey-ish. So, without a deeper modification (removing that effect) it is not possible to get any noticeable power saving by using a black theme.