Power Management

Power Saving techniques can be used to minimize the heat produced and conserve energy. On laptops, this can be especially important as it can significantly extend battery life and excessive heat can be both uncomfortable and loud on portable devices.

Power Management Software

There are several options for managing power under Manjaro. In this article, we will introduce three of the more popular options.

Note

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In most cases running more than one power management tool at a time can cause conflicts so it is best practice to only use one of the below options

TLP

TLP is the most commonly used option for automatic power management.

Installing TLP

TLP is available from the Manjaro repositories, can be installed with your favorite package manager or by using entering the following command into your terminal:

pamac install tlp

Now that it is installed, you need to start and enable the service. This can be accomplished with the command:

systemctl enable tlp --now

Note

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TLP 1.2.2 and lower need another service as well: tlp-sleep.service

Configuring TLP

TLP can manually configured by editing the file /etc/default/tlp as described in The Official Documentation.

A simpler way to configure TLP is via the GUI tool TLPUI

To install TLPUI install the package tlpui using your favorite package manager or with the command

pamac install tlpui

Laptop Mode Tools

An Alternative to TLP for laptops is Laptop Mode Tools(LMT).

Installing LMT

To install laptop-mode-tools, enter the following command into your terminal:

pamac install laptop-mode-tools

Once installed, to enable LMT to start automatically every time you boot your computer, enter the following into your terminal:

sudo systemctl enable --now laptop-mode.service

LMT automatically configures some settings for you in order to optimize your laptop's battery life.

LMT Configuration

For configuration, the file to edit is /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf}

The individual kernel modules can be configured from the configuration files present in /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/

PowerTOP

PowerTop a diagnostic tool used to identify and report issues with power consumption and management. It can be used as a reporting tool, an automated power management tool or both.

Installing PowerTop

It can be installed as

pamac install powertop

Generating Reports

You can generate a report using powertop with the command:

sudo powertop --html

This will create the file powertop.html in the current directory. You can open this file in any web browser.

If you are using TLP for power management you may notice some differences in the recommendations between the tools. The article Comparing TLP with PowerTop reporting describes some of the reasons for these differences.

Automated Tuning with PowerTop

The command sudo powertop --auto-tune" will allow PowerTop to automatically tune power management based on it's recommendations.

From a practical perspective, the best way to use PowerTops auto-tuning is with a systemd service.

To create, start and enable a systemd service for PowerTop you can use the commands:

sudo sh -c "echo -e '[Unit]\nDescription=PowerTop\n\n[Service]\nType=oneshot\nRemainAfterExit=true\nExecStart=/usr/bin/powertop --auto-tune\n\n[Install]\nWantedBy=multi-user.target\n' > /etc/systemd/system/powertop.service"
sudo systemctl enable --now powertop.service

Temperature/Thermal Management

ThermalD

ThermalD, the Linux Thermal Daemon can be used to automatically handle CPU frequency scaling according to system load.

To install it, install thermald in your favorite package manager or use the command:

pamac install thermald

After installing it needs to be configured to automatically start at boot in order to work:

sudo systemctl enable --now thermald

See Also

• How to undervolt Intel CPUs
• TLP website
• LaptopModeTools - Arch Wiki
• TLP - Arch wiki