[coreboot] Lenovo X200 running Coreboot drains 3-4W more power than with Vendor BIOS

[Peter Stuge]

Daniel Kulesz via coreboot wrote:
> my X60 supports C4 although it also seems to consume way too much power.

That platform has at least one significant power saving issue open,
which I think is no longer too well understood by the active folks.
It also involves power saving states, but I don't know exactly what
it is.


Daniel Kulesz via coreboot wrote:
> I .. wonder why I didn't read or hear about any complaints about
> running Libreboot/Coreboot on a X200

I guess that anyone who retrofits open source firmware feels that
the advantages outweigh such problems.


The X60 runs much hotter with coreboot than with vendor BIOS. Some of
that can probably be attributed to coreboot being worse at power
saving, but there are still differences under full load. I would not
be at all surprised if one reason is that the vendor BIOS
aritificially restricts the performance in order to meet thermal
design requirements.

In other words: I can very easily imagine that robust operation and
good-looking mechanical design was more important for the vendor than
getting top performance out of CPU+chipset and that they implemented
this policy in the BIOS, but coreboot doesn't, because noone in
coreboot knows what the appropriate thresholds are.

This is an intrinsic problem for anything that is retrofitted.


//Peter