It looks like I summarized iwm(4) updates too early, cause Imre Vadasz added an actual powersave option. I’d like to see someone with a power meter do some before-and-after testing.
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A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I did some power measurements with my hp x2 210 detachable (with AC3165 chipset), using a (still experimental) driver to read the battery discharge rate.
Enabling powersaving in iwm(4) via ifconfig and setting the hw.iwm.power_scheme=3 tunable, lowers power usage by ca. 0.25 W. So enabled wlan only seems to use ca. 50-100 mW then.
One thing to remember is, that powersaving is currently basically ineffective, when wlan is enabled and you aren’t connected to an access point yet, because of the continuous scanning then.
Also there are some more power-management features which I haven’t ported yet from Linux’s iwlwifi. e.g. low-power sending and receiving might improve things a bit more.