Re: [pulseaudio-discuss] Optimize PA for mobile usage
On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 07:21:44PM +0200, Paul Menzel wrote: I am not sure. 4 W power consumption of a sound chip sounds quite a lot to me. Additionally as written above please try a newer version. That's many orders of magnitude more than is sane unless there's very loud sound coming out of the speakers. Something beyond the audio specific hardware must be impacting the numbers. ___ pulseaudio-discuss mailing list pulseaudio-discuss@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
Re: [pulseaudio-discuss] Optimize PA for mobile usage
In Reply to: Mark Brown broo...@sirena.org.uk On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 07:21:44PM +0200, Paul Menzel wrote: I am not sure. 4 W power consumption of a sound chip sounds quite a lot to me. Additionally as written above please try a newer version. That's many orders of magnitude more than is sane unless there's very loud sound coming out of the speakers. Something beyond the audio specific hardware must be impacting the numbers. The numbers are read from the battery chip (/sys/class/power/BAT0/power_now) and are rougly matching with the runtime observed. Maybe they are a little optimistic. But I think the numbers have to be seen in context. 6-9W in idle is not bad for a performance oriented notebook, but I also have used all stable power saving tweaks that I am aware of. So if playing audio will wake up the sound chip, power the speakers, wake up the bus from power saving mode, ..., that might seam realisitc. I don't know enough about modern harware in that regard. regards, Andreas ___ pulseaudio-discuss mailing list pulseaudio-discuss@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
Re: [pulseaudio-discuss] Optimize PA for mobile usage
Dear Andreas, Am Freitag, den 07.10.2011, 17:03 +0200 schrieb Andreas Bauer: First a big thank you for a quality piece of software. I am a first time user and am amazed at the flexiblity that PA provides. I installed PA because I wanted to have better integration of my Bluetooth headset and works perfectly. thank you for such positive feed back. I guess developers (not me) should get that more often. Running Debian Squeeze (stable) with Kernel 3.0.1 Is the PA version 0.9.21-3+squeeze1 [1]? I guess the ALSA version is quite old then too. PA 1.0 was released recently. Could you somehow test a more recent version. I am not sure if there is a live CD for that purpose or if you have a spare storage medium where you can try Debian Sid/unstable. Now I have three issues which I hope someone can point me to a possible solution. On my Lenovo X201 laptop with Intel HDA I do see a heavy increase in power consumption when I activate pulseaudio. The system is already optimised so without pulseaudio it will idle at 6-9W with wifi on, with pulseaudio started it will jump to 13W. No pulseaudio client connected (no sound played) Averaged battery reading every 5s 1267000 1311000 133 1347000 - here pa-suspender is started 1192000 1091000 986000 952000 943000 988000 97 943000 I have already optimised the PA setup for my needs (e.g. low quality resampling-method), so I investigated further: From top: 8816 ab 9 -11 211m 3832 2832 S0 0.1 0:00.06 pulseaudio From powertop: 695,7 µs/s 13,6 Process/usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog So it is not about CPU consumption, pulseaudio is economical with CPU as is. The same thing (also drawing about the same amount of extra juice) happens with this: root@charly:~# mv /etc/asound.conf /etc/asound.pulse root@charly:~# aplay -d front /boot/vmlinuz-* Wiedergabe: Rohdaten '/boot/vmlinuz-3.0.1' : Unsigned 8 bit, Rate: 8000 Hz, mono So clearly, it is the power consumption of the sound chip. I suspect that pulseaudio activates the sound chip even when no sound is being played. Is there any way to have it only access the hardware when at minimum one client is connected (e.g. audio playing)? I am not sure. 4 W power consumption of a sound chip sounds quite a lot to me. Additionally as written above please try a newer version. I was not successful with this shot (old syntax?): add-autoload-sink alsa_sink module-alsa-sink device=hw:0 add-autoload-source alsa_source module-alsa-source device=hw:0 You can also take a look at the ALSA Wiki [2] and provide the output of `alsa-info.sh` which should give a lot of useful information to the developers. Second issue: I have one application (Zoiper) which can only access ALSA at the moment (because it will not allow me to input non-hardware ALSA device names like pcm.pulse). Is there some hack/workaround to get such applications to talk to pulseaudio? Please open a new thread by sending a new message with an appropriate subject line for this topic. Thanks, Paul [1] http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/pulseaudio [2] http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Help_To_Debug signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ pulseaudio-discuss mailing list pulseaudio-discuss@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
Re: [pulseaudio-discuss] Optimize PA for mobile usage
So it is not about CPU consumption, pulseaudio is economical with CPU as is. Have you loaded the module module-suspend-on-idle? If nothing is playing (and your volume UI isn't showing), the output device should be burn any power. I was not successful with this shot (old syntax?): add-autoload-sink alsa_sink module-alsa-sink device=hw:0 add-autoload-source alsa_source module-alsa-source device=hw:0 Never seen this syntax, use module-detect... Second issue: I have one application (Zoiper) which can only access ALSA at the moment (because it will not allow me to input non-hardware ALSA device names like pcm.pulse). Is there some hack/workaround to get such applications to talk to pulseaudio? use the pulse plugin from alsa-plugins. Works fine. ___ pulseaudio-discuss mailing list pulseaudio-discuss@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
Re: [pulseaudio-discuss] Optimize PA for mobile usage
On Fri, 2011-10-07 at 17:03 +0200, Andreas Bauer wrote: Second issue: I have one application (Zoiper) which can only access ALSA at the moment (because it will not allow me to input non-hardware ALSA device names like pcm.pulse). Is there some hack/workaround to get such applications to talk to pulseaudio? Do you know what device strings Zoiper uses? Does it provide any configurability? If it uses the device called default, then things work fine if you configure the default device to be the pulse plugin. If it insists on using the hardware directly, for example hw:0, then you're out of luck - Zoiper is buggy and I don't think there's a workaround for that. -- Tanu ___ pulseaudio-discuss mailing list pulseaudio-discuss@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
