Powertop, pm-utils and laptop-mode

Notes on power management for linux laptops. Nothing spectacular.

Squeezing some precious minutes out of your laptop battery and continue hacking on your rooftop.

powertop was initiated by Intel to help improve linux power management auditing and now allows you to activate "tunable" params to help improve your battery life and other power management aspects.

Things may be easier nowadays. See my notes on the lenovo t470.

1. Enabling

Combined with laptop-mode and pm-utils (Debian terminology): 

    echo "powertop --auto-tune" >> /etc/pm/power.d/powertop
    chmod +x /etc/pm/power.d/powertop
    pm-powersave true

2. Re-enabling

Be careful however, some settings can be pretty aggresive and remove enjoyable features such as:

  • the "always on USB" which allows for charging your phone while suspended
  • the max audio "power", will then sound weak
  • USB, video and overall performances

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PowerManagement/ReducedPower or http://www.lesswatts.org, there are a lot of hacks to improve further. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerTOP]: en.wikipedia.org//wiki/PowerTOP "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerTOP"

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