brcmsmac power consumption issues

As reported on the Novell and Kernel bugzillas:
11
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=890454
and
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81721

Short version: I have a laptop (Lenovo B570) with a built-in Broadcom
wireless chipset. Using the 'brcmsmac' driver, I observed very high
power consumption:

4000-6000mW as compared to 100-200mW for several other drivers.

Trying (openSUSE) kernel 3.16.0-rc7-2-desktop with backports-20140725,
that appears to have been reduced to 350-3900mW. A nice change but
still much higher than the rtl8192cu that I tested with the same
kernel and backports (3-30x higher).




-- 
Jon
Software Blacksmith