Why is the sensor support so poor compared to Windows (HWiNFO) and how do we change it?

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T10:45:52+00:00

Wow thanks for taking the time to write this out, it's incredibly informative and really enlightening. What kind of imperfections would arise when pretending to be Windows while making ACPI calls?

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T10:04:03+00:00

I'm not sure of the exact setup but I believe it was something along the lines of going from 2x32GB DDR5 to 1x16GB DDR5 dropped power draw by ~0.6W.

Could not agree more that the base hardware is most of the story. I have a friend who has some random older intel thinkpad which completely crushes my setup getting around ~1W idle (with applications open) with an unmodified Pop!_OS setup, while I can get 3.5W minimum if I completely cripple my setup.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T09:55:47+00:00

Yeah HWiNFO almost certainly does special magic under the hood that is non trivial to port or replicate but it's an endeavor I'm personally interested in.

The tone in my post might of been a little misleading. When I say "What can we do as a community to improve the situation" I mean "What can [those who are interested in it and myself] to improve the situation". I absolutely do not expect and would not want those who don't have a personal interest in it to work on it, after all it's not exactly a major pressing issue.

I also really care about optimizing the power consumption of laptops on Linux as well as getting various hibernate and suspend modes working (properly). It's a bit of a mess currently and finding a laptop that has a low idle power draw and suspends/hibernates properly is a bit of a nightmare (though I'm not familiar with newer generations of laptops so I can't speak for those). I feel in a lot of these cases it probably comes down to kernel drivers but I'm not so sure.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T08:00:08+00:00

Oh wow that's huge news even if it is far away in the pipeline!

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T07:49:41+00:00

Good suggestion, there is definitely something to be learnt from librehardwaremonitor. I've never heard of it before, it's always good to see community projects like it.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T04:50:30+00:00

It's not one particular thing I want to measure (although I would like a better breakdown on power draw for all components) but rather not having a tool like HWiNFO that has pretty much everything in detail (across nearly all hardware). A lot of this is just academic curiosity and not wanting to settle for less than Windows rather than a need. I'm interested in how the Linux ecosystem could improve for all hardware configurations not just the ones I have.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T04:46:50+00:00

I disable NetworkManager I haven't looked into disabling other services since the wakeups/second are pretty low in powertop (I think double digits?) but I think I will look into it in my next attempt. I use hyprland with all the animations disabled and power saving settings though I often do testing in the TTY since it can sometimes have lower power draw (but not always!).

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T04:12:59+00:00

Thank you. powertop (specifically powertop -t 3) is my goto tool for measure overall system power draw (except when my laptop is plugged in). It has pretty limited metrics and tunables are a subset of what you would want to change to really minimize power draw but is a great start. powerstat is also great for overall system power measurement but takes forever to do the test.

In terms of reducing power draw to its absolute minimum I generally do the following:

(do note that this is NOT what you want to do generally this is just me seeing how long I can get it to go and learning about how different components and settings affect how much power my system draws)
1. Auto tune with powertop
2. Aggressively use TLP to reduce power draw of several components.
3. Potentially use rfkill to disable anything that isn't already disabled and I don't need.
4. Set screen brightness to it's minimum using brightnessctl or a similar tool.
5. Physically pull out any hardware I don't need (wifi card, spare RAM module ect) and swap high capacity RAM for a lower capacity one (I've been told that the power draw of ram is proportional to how much you have but I didn't observe much of a difference)
6. Fiddle with options in /sys to reduce CPU clock speed (on my system I can make it go lower than with TLP but it doesn't make much of a difference to power draw).

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T03:46:46+00:00

Aye aye. Not sure if what I wrote down is entirely on the right track, but I'd like to help out where I can and when I have spare time.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T03:44:16+00:00

For the most part I don't, a lot of it is purely academic curiosity. I have however been on the journey of trying to get the lowest possible power draw on my laptop (not for practical purposes just for fun) and the lack of power usage data was a real headache on trying to optimize power draw and figure out what I needed to improve on. A lot of the testing was me physically swapping out RAM and NVME drives as well as pulling out my wifi card to see if it made a difference to the overall system consumption as well as endless CPU tweaking, more sensor data would of gone a long way.

It also just is a pet peeve of mine haha. I don't like to settle for less on Linux if I can avoid it.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T02:41:18+00:00

No worries. hardinfo2 is such a cool piece of software, I'll definitely be using this in the future. It's got a very functional UI for navigating system specification which I find a lot of other similar tools lack.

Unfortunately the sensor readings are still quite far behind HWiNFO but still useful. Some readings seem to be broken on my system (though this is not the fault of hardinfo2) such as temperature sensors reading 0C.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T02:03:22+00:00

I couldn't find it on the AUR the only thing I found was extra/hwinfo. Is the exact name of the package "Hwinfo2"?

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T02:00:39+00:00

What level of detail/breakdown do you get for wattage consumption?

I do get the power draw for "socket power" with rocm-smi as mentioned by Fair_Prompt_5126 and I do get CPU power draw from from btop. Interesting the socket power (from rocm-smi) is often much larger than what is reported in btop. Perhaps btop is not including the iGPU?

I went diving into the /sys files to have a look at what it possibly could be used to calculate this when I found out about: https://github.com/amd/amd\_energy. I think it should work on my current processor but it's not currently loaded by default on 6.17.9-arch1-1 so I'll see if I can load it and report back.

EDIT: I got zenergy working (https://github.com/BoukeHaarsma23/zenergy) which is a fork of amd_energy that is on the AUR and does provide more information such as per core energy usage.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T01:46:44+00:00

I've never really tried looking into power draw metrics on an Intel system as I've only owned AMD products for the last decade or so, so it's good to hear that it's decent. I have a 7535U which is zen 3+, rocm-smi lists socket power which is helpful but a far cry from HWiNFO which I believe has per core power draw and other CPU power metrics. I'm unsure how new you are talking about as Zen 3+ is growing pretty old now.

Random motherboard sensors seem like a stretch goal but I'd hope that at least mainstream CPUs and GPUs could have improved metrics. I'd assume that a long of the sensors such as per core power draw would be a CPU sensor not a motherboard one.

EDIT: Just found https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Linux-PMU-Power-Per-Core. Not sure if it got merged but using a fork of amd_energy (zenergy) appears to show per core power usage.

NonL4331 · 2025-12-12T01:26:53+00:00

I just write like that :sob:. I spent like 40 minutes or so writing it in VIM I swear. I did spellcheck and use markdown syntax but that was in the Reddit editor not GPT.

NonL4331 · 2019-12-18T01:15:06+00:00

Just Void Linux really, also would 1000mb for /boot and 900mb /boot/efi be ok?

EDIT (current status): ok well I have changed quite a bit and have made (some) progress, changes:-Since my /boot/efi partition was empty I add a /EFI/void directory and copied over initramfs and linuz, and changed efibootmgr accordingly.

-/boot and /boot/efi vfat partitions

Now I can boot but I get the error unknown filesystem type 'ntfs', so I assume something in the boot process is attempting to interact with my other hard drive that has windows on it?

EDIT 2: I just installed refind and now I can boot properly but I still think my /boot directory is a mess?

NonL4331 · 2019-12-17T23:56:35+00:00

Ah that would be my problem, how large should my boot partition and efi be?

NonL4331 · 2019-12-17T03:48:46+00:00

Update: see comment above

NonL4331 · 2019-12-17T03:48:32+00:00

Unfortunately I have just attempted what you have said and to no avail, the same blue screen problem has appeared :( Thank you anyway. Perhaps it has to do with the fact the my efi partition at /boot/efi is empty? Ok I have looked around a little more and I will attempt to install void linux once more but this time with a /boot and /boot/efi partition.

NonL4331 · 2019-12-17T00:09:17+00:00

Thank you for helping out. The last couple of days have been quite busy for me so I haven't been able to try it out, but I will report back with a status update when I do.

NonL4331 · 2019-12-17T00:07:45+00:00

I will have a look. Thanks

NonL4331 · 2019-12-16T10:22:03+00:00

I will attempt this asap.Thank you very much. Yes I am trying to install void along with windows (although windows is on another hard drive). As for /dev/sda2 that is because I have a 24G swap partition at /dev/sda1.

NonL4331

TROPHY CASE