How to improve Ubuntu Laptop Power Management
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Additional possibilities to save battery power are easily found on the web with the search engine of your choice. But selecting the right solutions for your particular hardware and Linux flavour from the myriad of wikis, blogs and forums is much more difficult and often requires advanced Linux knowledge on behalf of the user.
TLP brings you the benefits of advanced power management for Linux without the need to understand every technical detail.
TLP does not replace but enhance the existing power management of your Linux installation. TLP applies it's settings upon system startup and on every change of the power source.
TLP packages are available for Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE and Ubuntu.
Features
TLP is a pure command line tool with automated background tasks. It does not contain a GUI.
Settings depending on the Power Source
Kernel laptop mode and dirty buffer timeouts
Processor frequency scaling including "turbo boost" / "turbo core"
Power aware process scheduler for multi-core/hyper-threading
Hard disk advanced power magement level and spin down timeout (per disk)
SATA aggressive link power management (ALPM)
PCI Express active state power management (PCIe ASPM) – Linux 2.6.35 and above
Runtime power management for PCI(e) bus devices – Linux 2.6.35 and above
Radeon KMS power management – Linux 2.6.35 and above, not fglrx
Wifi power saving mode – depending on kernel/driver
Power off optical drive in drive bay (on battery)
Additional functions
I/O scheduler (per disk)
USB autosuspend with blacklist
Audio power saving mode – hda_intel, ac97
Enable or disable integrated wifi, bluetooth or wwan devices upon system startup and shutdown
Restore radio device state on system startup (from previous shutdown).
Radio device wizard: switch radios upon network connect/disconnect and dock/undock
Disable Wake On LAN
WWAN state is restored after suspend/hibernate
Untervolting of Intel processors – requires kernel with PHC-Patch
Battery charge thresholds – ThinkPads only
Recalibrate battery – ThinkPads only
Install TLP in ubuntu
Preparing your system
Prerequisites
Please remove user specific power save settings and scripts (for example in /etc/rc.local), otherwise expect unpredictable results
Please remove laptop-mode-tools
Open the terminal and run the following command
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw tp-smapi-dkms smartmontools ethtool
Sandy Bridge and newer models (X220/T420, X230/T430 et al.) require an additional:
sudo apt-get install acpi-call-tools
Details of packages
tlp (PPA) – Power saving
tlp-rdw (PPA) – optional, Radio Device Wizard
tp-smapi-dkms (universe) – optional ThinkPad only, tp-smapi is needed for battery charge thresholds and ThinkPad specific status output of tlp-stat
acpi-call-tools (PPA) – optional ThinkPad only, acpi-call is needed for battery charge thresholds on Sandy Bridge and newer models (X220/T420, X230/T430 et al.)
smartmontools (main) – optional, needed by tlp-stat to display disk drive S.M.A.R.T. data
ethtool (main) – optional, needed to disable wake on lan
Now install TLP by running the following commands from your terminal
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw
Start TLP program
You can start using the following command
sudo tlp start
Use the tlp-stat terminal command to check if TLP is working properly
sudo tlp-stat
and check the output for
+++ System Status
TLP power save = enabled
power source = ...
More useful commands
Show battery information only:
sudo tlp-stat -b
sudo tlp-stat --battery
Show configuration only:
tlp-stat -c
tlp-stat --config
Show radio devices switch state only:
tlp-stat -r
tlp-stat --rfkill
Show temperatures and fan speed only:
tlp-stat -t
tlp-stat --rfkill
Show trace output from /var/log/debug:
tlp-stat -T
tlp-stat --trace, --rfkill
You check here for full configuration details.
