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_poll
According 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.