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I ran powertop, and it says that the Realtek audio codec is using 100.0% of the cpu. Is this a problem?

I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit on Intel® Core™ i7 CPU M 640 @ 2.80GHz × 4 Sony VAIO laptop.

functionptr
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4 Answers4

27

Try changing "Enable Audio codec power management" to good in the Tunables tab for powertop. After doing so, hwC0D0 is no longer listed in powertop for me.

undoIT
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9

No, it just means that you have (probably digital) sound output enabled. If you have some sound outputs, such as digital (optical/coaxial) or hdmi you are not using, then you can blacklist their drivers and you might save some battery. They will be listed in lsmod something like, snd_hda_code_realtek and snd_hda_codec_hdmi. By adding these to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf you can disable them.

Raja G
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daithib8
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7

I found that muting the microphone input in the mixer solved the problem. I use a Dell XPS17.

Ian Chard
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0

Muting / disabling stuff with alsamixer helped me get rid of the same problem on macbook air.

Erb
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