Power Management

Power Saving Techniques can be used on Laptops to maximize the Battery Life and minimize the heat produced, and conserve energy.

Power Saving using TLP

TLP can be used for automatic power management.

From the website of TLP,

TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux without the need to understand every technical detail. TLP comes with a default configuration already optimized for battery life, so you may just install and forget it. Nevertheless TLP is highly customizable to fulfil your specific requirements.

All TLP settings are stored in the config file /etc/default/tlp. As the default configuration already provides for optimized battery saving, in many cases there is no immediate need to change it.

TLP is a pure command line tool with automated background tasks. It does not contain a GUI.

How to Install TLP

TLP is present in the AUR. It can be installed by using the following command-

yaourt -S tlp

After installing it, it needs to be configured to be run at startup-

systemctl enable tlp
systemctl enable tlp-sleep.service

The above commands will make it autostart at boot time.

Note

TLP can conflict with laptop-mode-tools, so if you have laptop-mode-tools installed and want to install TLP, then uninstall laptop-mode-tools first!

Alternative to TLP: Laptop-Mode-Tools

From the Arch Wiki-

Laptop Mode Tools is a laptop power saving package for Linux systems. It is the primary way to enable the Laptop Mode feature of the Linux kernel, which lets your hard drive spin down. In addition, it allows you to tweak a number of other power-related settings using a simple configuration file.

To install laptop-mode-tools

sudo pacman -S laptop-mode-tools

Note that laptop-mode-tools and tlp shouldnt be installed together!

To enable laptop-mode-tools to start at boot automatically

sudo systemctl enable laptop-mode.service

laptop-mode-tools also automatically configures some settings for optimising battery life.

For user configuration, the file to edit is

/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf

(primary configuration file)

The individual modules can be configured from the configuration files present in

/etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/

Minimizing Laptop/Desktop temperatures

For Intel Machines

The intel pstate driver automatically handles CPU frequency scaling according to system load.

Note that the Intel Pstate works only with kernels >= 3.9, and kernel 3.11 is recommended.

Supported processor families are Intel Sandy Bridge, Ivy Leage and up.

The Intel Thermal Daemon (thermald) can be installed to automatically manage the CPU Temperature.

Install it with

yaourt -S thermald

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

sudo systemctl enable thermald

For AMD Machines

With Linux Kernel 3.11, AMD introduced Dyanamic Power Management (DPM) for the GPU for the free drivers, which can lead to lower power consumption and better operating temperatures.

To enable it,

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

add/change the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="radeon.dpm=1"

and generate grub.cfg

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

PowerTOP

PowerTop a diagnostic tool used to identify and report issues with power consumption and management. It can be used to check the power consumption.

Install it with-

sudo pacman -S powertop

Run PowerTop to analyze power consumption

sudo powertop

To save PowerTops output to a file,

sudo powertop --html

For more details, see Powertop : Manjaro Wiki

Support

Following is a link to this page's forum counterpart where you can post any related feedback: [1]

Credit goes to LiberteCzech for posting about TLP, and to Arup for posting about Thermald, and to the Arch Wiki for their documentation, especially on Laptop-Mode-Tools

For some more configuration, see FadeMind's forum tutuorial here

See Also

PowerTop

TLP

LaptopModeTools-Arch Wiki