How can I disable asus-nb-wmi when using battery power mode?
I'm trying to improve the battery life of my Asus U32U notebook. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 64bit and using powertop it shows the following:
PowerTOP 1.97 Overview Idle stats Frequency stats Device stats Tunables
Summary: 311.6 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/second and 0.0 VFS ops/sec
Power est. Usage Events/s Category Description 6.29 W 100.0% Device Radio device: asus-nb-wmi 1.19 W 100.0% Device Display backlight 0 mW 49.3 ms/s 42.8 Process compiz 0 mW 19.5 ms/s 51.4 Process /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/li 0 mW 10.3 ms/s 16.8 Process gnome-terminal 0 mW 5.5 ms/s 118.1 Interrupt PS/2 Touchpad / Keyboard / Mous 0 mW 2.0 ms/s 37.0 Interrupt [45] fglrx[0]@PCI:0:1:0 0 mW 1.6 ms/s 0.4 Process powertop 0 mW 1.5 ms/s 1.1 Process /usr/lib/unity/unity-panel-serv 0 mW 1.0 ms/s 4.5 Timer tick_sched_timer 0 mW 1.0 ms/s 9.3 Process syndaemon -i 2.0 -K -R -t 0 mW 0.9 ms/s 20.3 Timer hrtimer_wakeup 0 mW 0.8 ms/s 0.2 Process [flush-ecryptfs-] 0 mW 0.7 ms/s 0.9 Process /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/ 0 mW 697.3 µs/s 0.2 kWork rfkill_pollAccording to this Ubuntu community help page the asus-nb-wmi driver is responsible for implementing the function keys, something I can definitely live without if it means I will get longer battery sessions.
So I would like to know if its possible to disable the asus-nb-wmi when not plugged in to AC power, and if so, how.
3 Answers
I have a similar asus laptop. However, on mine it's called "asus_nb_wmi". I just use
sudo rmmod asus_nb_wmito disable, and then
sudo modprobe asus_nb_wmiif i want to reenable it and be able to use function keys to control the volume level again.
Add this line to your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:
blacklist asus-nb-wmiThat will disable loading asus-nb-wmi on boot.
esben's answer works great for this. However, I think the underlying problem is different. I have a very similar laptop and the culprit was that the keyboard backlight uses an excessive amount of power. That power is attributed to asus-nb-wmi, but you can solve the problem simply by turning down the keyboard backlight. This way you don't lose the ability to use your Fn keys.
