TLP
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From the project page:
- 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.
Contents
Installation
Install tlp from the official repositories - pay attention to its optional dependencies that may help provide additional power saving.
To complete TLP's install, you must enable the systemd services tlp.service
and tlp-sleep.service
.
You should also mask the systemd service systemd-rfkill.service
to avoid conflicts with TLP's radio options:
# systemctl mask systemd-rfkill
Start
After installation TLP will be automatically activated upon system start. To start it immediately without reboot or to apply changed settings, use:
# tlp start
Configuration
The configuration file is located at /etc/default/tlp
and provides a "largely" optimized power saving by default. For a full explanation of options see: TLP configuration.
Listed here are notable examples.
CPU frequency scaling governor
TLP can control the CPU frequency scaling governor:
CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_AC=performance CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_BAT=ondemand
Hard disk
Most disks have power saving built-in whose settings can be adjusted, set to: 255 to disable, 128 for the maximum power save value, < 128 will enable disk spindown and possibly additional power savings. Before setting a spindown value, think carefully before using: spindowns require disk wakeups that negatively contribute to disk longevity.
DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_AC="254 254" DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_BAT="128 128"
Optical drive
Powering down the optical drive can save a little bit of power (power restored on disk-enter or tray close).
BAY_POWEROFF_ON_BAT=1
Radio device state
TLP can manage the power state of Bluetooth, WiFi and WWAN devices upon system start.
To restore radio device states on startup:
RESTORE_DEVICE_STATE_ON_STARTUP=1
To enable or disable specific devices at boot, use the following options:
DEVICES_TO_DISABLE_ON_STARTUP="wifi" DEVICES_TO_ENABLE_ON_STARTUP=""
Radio Device Wizard
The Radio Device Wizard allows an even more sophisticated management of radio devices depending on network connect/disconnect events.
It requires NetworkManager to be installed as a dependency, tlp-rdw from the official repositories, and the NetworkManager-dispatcher.service
be enabled and started.
Refer to TLP configuration for the relevant options.
Command line tools
TLP provides several command line tools. See TLP commands for full details.
To generate a report of the loaded configuration and the current power state of the devices, run:
tlp-stat
It can also be used to control battery charging and discharging on supported ThinkPad laptops, to discharge:
tlp discharge
Features intentionally excluded
- Fan control. See Fan speed control and Thinkpad Fan Control
- Backlight brightness. See Backlight
See also
- TLP - Linux Advanced Power Management - Project homepage & documentation.
- aclidswitch-git - Supplementary tool that extends TLP's functionality to run commands depending on the laptop's AC state