High battery usage with ath11k on Dell 9310

[Kalle Valo]

Mark Herbert <mark.herbert42 at gmail.com> writes:

> Simply disabling wifi  drops 0.8-1 watts from power consumption.
> Comparing almost same model (16 gb RAM vs 32) but based on Intel card
> shows the same difference - Intel based laptop with WiFi connected
> consumes about same as ath11k with Wifi discnnected.
>
> Powertop  newer shows PC states below PC6. Disabling WiFi allows PC8,
> disabling ath11k completely (bios) - PC10.
>
> Wifi enabled
>
>            Pkg(HW)
> C2 (pc2)   18,5%    |
> C3 (pc3)   14,2%    |
> C6 (pc6)   47,5%    |
> C7 (pc7)    0,0%    |
> C8 (pc8)    0,0%    |
> C9 (pc9)    0,0%    |
> C10 (pc10)  0,0%    |
>
> Wfi disabled (by networkmanager/nm-applet)
>
>
>            Pkg(HW)
> C2 (pc2)   10,8%    |
> C3 (pc3)   18,5%    |
> C6 (pc6)    1,1%    |
> C7 (pc7)    0,3%    |
> C8 (pc8)   28,3%    |
> C9 (pc9)    0,0%    |
> C10 (pc10)  0,0%    |
>
> Seems that even on no network activity ath11k forces CPU to stay awake
> and eat battery. There are some background transfer happening as I
> have Viber, thunderbird and firefox opened so I bet they do sent some
> but there is no file transfers, media streams etc. Under the same
> conditions (taking this disk from one 9310 to other 9310 - same
> software, same kernel - just wifi's different) - iwlwifi manages to
> reach PC8-PC10 being connected.  With ath10k on dell XPS-13 9350 intel
> also was saving battery much better than ath10k, bit there was like
> 88% of PC10 with intel and 65% PC10 and 20% PC8 with ath10k. But it
> was not such terribly bad as with ath11.
>
> There is already kernel bug for this, not creating duplicates
>
> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=214543

Thanks for the excellent report and including all that information to
the bug report as well, we will investigate this.

-- 
https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-wireless/list/

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/developers/documentation/submittingpatches