Help with broken "performance" "balanced" and "battery saver" mode

Itsajjj

Itsajjj I am running Solus Gnome if that's important. I forgot to mention my desktop environment in the post.

BuzzPCSOS

Itsajjj It may also be worth looking at the health of the battery, this will show up as the condition when you run inxi -B.
Lower percentages indicate poor battery health and as the percentage drops below about 50% the way that battery performance is reported by your computer can become very erratic, exhibiting behaviour similar to your description.
If your battery health is good then please ignore this suggestion.

davidjharder

Could you give the output of two commands that will tell us more about your machine: inxi -b (basic output) and inxi -B (battery)

Itsajjj

davidjharder
The output is pasted as follows:
System:
Host: dellpickle Kernel: 6.11.10-310.current arch: x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: GNOME v: 47.1 Distro: Solus 4.6 convergence
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: Dell product: Inspiron 5558 v: 01
serial: <superuser required>
Mobo: Dell model: 086DKN v: A00 serial: <superuser required> UEFI: Dell
v: A14 date: 11/22/2016
Battery:
ID-1: BAT0 charge: 26.7 Wh (100.0%) condition: 26.7/41.4 Wh (64.5%)
CPU:
Info: dual core Intel Core i7-5500U [MT MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 1800
min/max: 500/3000
Graphics:
Device-1: Intel HD Graphics 5500 driver: i915 v: kernel
Device-2: NVIDIA GK208BM [GeForce 920M] driver: nouveau v: kernel
Device-3: Microdia Integrated Webcam HD driver: uvcvideo type: USB
Display: wayland server: X.Org v: 24.1.4 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.4
compositor: gnome-shell driver: X: loaded: modesetting,nouveau
unloaded: fbdev,vesa dri: iris,nouveau gpu: i915 resolution: 1366x768_60Hz
API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.3 vendor: intel mesa v: 24.2.7
renderer: Mesa Intel HD Graphics 5500 (BDW GT2)
Network:
Device-1: Intel Wireless 3160 driver: iwlwifi
Device-2: Realtek RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet driver: r8169
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 931.51 GiB used: 267.08 GiB (28.7%)
Info:
Memory: total: 8 GiB available: 7.67 GiB used: 1.89 GiB (24.6%)
Processes: 218 Uptime: 16m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.36

Of course the battery is getting older and is down to close to 50% capacity, but would that affect plugged in performance?

TraceyC

This could be related to the power daemon not working properly. Hopefully someone who knows details about that in GNOME can provide more detail. In the meantime, please do paste in the information David asked for, thanks.

Itsajjj

BuzzPCSOS The battery health is in the 60%s, but the performance problem exhibits itself with the battery both plugged in and unplugged. But the battery health is probably to blame for the bad percentage reporting.

Itsajjj

Itsajjj I'd be happy to take the battery out if that was the only option, but I feel like the battery shouldn't be effecting the plugged in performance this much.

Itsajjj

Itsajjj Update: Taking the battery out and rebooting does not fix the performance scaling issue.

Axios

Itsajjj If you do (powerprofilesctl) from terminal what do you get.
Will be astric in front of active one

If you do powerporfilesctl set <PROFILE> Like powerporfilesctl set Performance
does it change the profile or act the same. (from terminal)

BuzzPCSOS

Itsajjj I noticed from your spec report that the bios is on A14 which is way out of date as the latest for this PC is A17. Regardless of if it might fix your power scaling issues it would be really good policy to update to the latest version as it contains many performance fixes.

Itsajjj

BuzzPCSOS How would I go about flashing the update? The dell website has a .exe file. Is that windows only? I tried copying it to a usb but the bios wouldn't read off of it. Is it safe to copy that .exe to my root directory, as the bios mounted that. Or is there something else I should do?

Axios

I dont know how that got messed up copy and pasted
its powerprofilesctl set performance

Itsajjj

Axios
The output of powerprofilesctl is:
performance:
CpuDriver: intel_pstate
PlatformDriver: platform_profile
Degraded: no

balanced:
CpuDriver: intel_pstate
PlatformDriver: platform_profile

power-saver:
CpuDriver: intel_pstate
PlatformDriver: platform_profile
Then after running: "powerprofilesctl set performance" and "powerprofilesctl" the output still indicates balanced and doesn't change in any way. That was a good suggestion though and I will update my bios next just to try it. (Thanks BuzzPCSOS)

BuzzPCSOS

Itsajjj This site will give you a very adequate explanation of what to do.