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Installing Linux has had huge wins for me for power usage. Running powertop --auto-tune helps a good bit. I used to fiddle forever but this gets like 80% of th

Installing Linux has had huge wins for me for power usage. Running powertop --auto-tune helps a good bit. I used to fiddle forever but this gets like 80% of the wins. Things like "do we reduce power state of sata links" used to be extremely conservatively set, for fear of really old hardware from the beginning of sata era that behaved badly, but was an obvious &bhige win for 99.999999% of folk. Linux has finally started turning a bunch of these baseline expected tuning on by default, across the past few years (rather than powertop doing it), so the out of box experience is finally much more reasonable. It's been like this forever but people love throwing shade. I had a Transmeta Crusoe laptop (p1120) amd yes, at first battery life was worde. But I did low hanging fruit optimizations, and Linux got better, and soon I had like an hour more runtime on Linux. Mac famously has a trashburger IO subsystem, so not having that boat anchor hanging off the side should probably let the system hurry-up-and-idle better, saving power.

pxc 4y ago
powertop is way underrated. You don't have to know much to get a lot out of it safely.
FooBarWidget 4y ago
I don't understand why the powertop tunings aren't the default when the distro detects it's running on a laptop.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  The most annoying thing that prevents me from running --auto-tune on bootup is that there's no way to exclude USB devices. So if I boot when docked, the mouse will stop working when I don't move it for a few seconds and I need to click to make it work again. And no, unplugging it once is not an acceptable solution.
  - rektide 4y ago
    It just got added in 2023, but there's now --auto-tune-dump which generates a command line invocation of powertop that would set all the auto-tune settings. Instead of running --auto-tune, you can make a script of this dump, modify it to your contentment, and run the script instead of auto-tune at startup. So you can omit your mouse! Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain device or subsystem tunings from auto-tune as well. Personally I think it'd be fun to mess around with more advanced schemes, where we dynamically alter powersaving behaviors based on user behavior. What we have now seems somewhat unresponsive. It'd be fun to dive into. https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116 https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116
    - iforgotpassword 4y ago
      Awesome! Yes, I was thinking about doing this manually by toggling every setting manually and copying the command being displayed but gave up quite quickly as it was too cumbersome. Sometimes the screen would refresh before you copied so you had to do it again... This option solves that nicely.
psychoslave 4y ago
I wasn't wasn't of this, thanks

pxc 4y ago

powertop is way underrated. You don't have to know much to get a lot out of it safely.

FooBarWidget 4y ago

I don't understand why the powertop tunings aren't the default when the distro detects it's running on a laptop.

iforgotpassword 4y ago
The most annoying thing that prevents me from running --auto-tune on bootup is that there's no way to exclude USB devices. So if I boot when docked, the mouse will stop working when I don't move it for a few seconds and I need to click to make it work again. And no, unplugging it once is not an acceptable solution.
- rektide 4y ago
  It just got added in 2023, but there's now --auto-tune-dump which generates a command line invocation of powertop that would set all the auto-tune settings. Instead of running --auto-tune, you can make a script of this dump, modify it to your contentment, and run the script instead of auto-tune at startup. So you can omit your mouse! Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain device or subsystem tunings from auto-tune as well. Personally I think it'd be fun to mess around with more advanced schemes, where we dynamically alter powersaving behaviors based on user behavior. What we have now seems somewhat unresponsive. It'd be fun to dive into. https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116 https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Awesome! Yes, I was thinking about doing this manually by toggling every setting manually and copying the command being displayed but gave up quite quickly as it was too cumbersome. Sometimes the screen would refresh before you copied so you had to do it again... This option solves that nicely.

psychoslave 4y ago

I wasn't wasn't of this, thanks