Power management on a Macbook Pro

Eugene Tretyak etretyak at gmail.com
Tue Apr 13 21:14:50 UTC 2010


Hi, John!

On 13 April 2010 17:35, John Maclean <jayeola at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have 15" MBP and it's all gravy. No matter how much I try to get used
> to this OS I still yearn for a "proper *nix system" and put F12 onto a
> partition on this laptop. So I'm dual booting with Snow Leopard and f12
> and cannot help wondering why the power management is so different
> between the two systems.

Which MBP do you have?

A new Unibody MBPs have two GPUs: GeForce 9400M and 9600M GT.
In Mac OS X a 9400M GPU is used by default for power saving.
In Linux if you boot in BIOS (Bootcamp) mode you'll get only 9600M GPU
which eats a lot of power resources.
There is an option to boot in EFI mode. In this case you'll be able to
see both GPUs, and you can select which one to use. This should save
you some battery time.

[skipped]

> How do others find using F12/F13 beta with an MBP?

I don't have a Linux installed on my MBP 5,1. But I'm going to try F13 on it.
I'll post my results.


--Gene


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