Laptop tools

[Massimo B.]

Hi,

my installation was migrated for years and maybe I'm based on obsolete tools. What is today required for mobile laptops in general?

I was always using app-laptop/laptop-mode-tools and it's still working. At least it does set harddrive parameters for spindown and dirty timeouts while today the laptop only has NVMe drives, /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/intel_pstate.conf is throttling the CPU on battery. So it still sounds useful.
Last update was 1.74 - Sat Jul 18 19:10:40 IST 2020.

On IRC I read that laptop-mode-tools are not the modern way anymore. On Intel platforms sys-power/tlp would be used, and on AMD platforms sys-power/power-profiles-daemon would be used.

I looked around https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Category:Laptops and only found model-specific Wikis, but no common Gentoo-on-laptops Wiki.
Which tools do I need today and for which generation and architecture?

For not dealing with that many modern kernel options and required firmwares I currently just run a distro-kernel sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin and a complete sys-kernel/linux-firmware, using 1,1G /lib/firmware/ which is 583M usage by btrfs zstd compression.
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[logrusx]

What's the specific issue you're trying to solve? And yes, I haven't heard of laptop mode tools since 2010 when it still was a thing and I still had a ThinkPad. When I returned back to Linux in 2018 it was already outdated. Nowadays I personally don't use anything else other than power-profiles-daemon on my AMD laptop and I don't even think it does anything useful.

Best Regards,
Georgi

[Massimo B.]

As usual, saving power by throttling CPU, GPU, harddisks, frequencies, dirty cycles, displays, brightness, timeouts etc...
A lot of all that what laptop-mode-tools already do and still doing.
At least there have been updates to the project after your comeback. Beside that, I'm using Linux since 2003, never left and nothing else. All years before have been a waste of time.
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[Goverp]

I use laptop tools. I last looked a couple of years ago, and it was still as good as anything else. Mostly you want to ensure your kernel and drivers have all the necessary low power modes supported, the right frequency driver (IIUC schedutil is what the kernel guys recommend), and the appropriate thermal drivers for your hardware. IIUC you're using a general-purpose kernel, so you should have those already. There's not much more for the tools to do than select the lower-energy settings when running on batteries, and laptop tools does that. IMHO steer clear of using hdparm or whatever to spin down disks, if you still have any - you can lose data, and spinning up a disk takes quite a bit of power compared with just keeping them spinning, so the saving isn't that large. Better, replace the disk with an SSD and your laptop will appear 10 times faster as well as consuming less power.

If you try the power monitoring tool (the proper one, I forget its name, but it's more detailed than the one built into desktop GUIs), you'll almost certainly find that top consumer is the cpu if running 100% (but usually it's idling), then the screen. All the rest tends to be minor, so once you have the frequency driver working, the next best way to save energy is to turn the screen off!
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Greybeard

[logrusx]

[xgivolari]

For most intents and purposes, TLP at default settings works very well. With newer laptops, it is important to ensure that S0ix/modern standby is working properly, and that the system is reaching lower runtime power states. You can use S0ixSelftestTool and powertop for that. If you are running GNOME or KDE, power-profiles-daemon integrates very nicely with these. However, it is neither as extensive as, nor compatible with TLP. Both work just fine on Intel and AMD systems. Additionally on intel, it is recommended to install thermald for better thermal/power management.

[Massimo B.]

You mean, neither sys-power/tlp nor sys-power/power-profiles-daemon are architecture specific and both should work on Intel and AMD? And power-profile-daemon only integrates well when using KDE or Gnome?
I'm using Xfce, OpenRC (no systemd). So for all that systemd does for powersaving, I don't have that.

So I keep laptop-mode-tools for now, as it does not harm, mostly sets harddisk powersaving, usually not that important when using SSDs.
What else I need, tlp, power-profiles-daemon?

I started with powertop. On some old Ivy Bridge desktop, it doesn't work, eventhough the kernel seems to have that all:

[Massimo B.]

Next one, testing tlp. The project sounds good and modern, applying quite the same as powertop --auto-tune would do:

[Massimo B.]

Ok, solved by

[Massimo B.]

[Massimo B.]

Using TLP now as default on Laptops, does it make any sense to use it on Desktop machines which are always running in AC mode? Actually even when using the AC mode only, TLP has a lot of configuration there.
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[Banana]

AS far as I understand the docs, tlp does "nothing" when in AC mode. So you need to configure it to work woth the constant power on mode and not having a battery.
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[Massimo B.]

It does. You can add some powersaving even in AC mode, which could be also interesting for AC-only machines:
https://linrunner.de/tlp/support/optimizing.html#opt-reduce-power-on-ac
I wouldn't need it so far, my machine isn't overheating, so I like to take most of the available power. And pstate already does a good powermanagement without keeping the CPU at max performance all the time.
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[Banana]

[Massimo B.]

Something else. What is responsible to do some emergency shutdown on low battery? I remember vaguely that some of all these frameworks was able to do some emergency shutdown or suspend to disk on critical battery level...

In old laptop-mode-tools that I already removed, there was at least DISABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_CRITICAL_BATTERY_LEVEL=1, not a real shutdown but some sort of sync before the system is dying. On TLP I don't see anything like that. Recently I ran out of battery and there was nothing about it in the logs, which seems to be no shutdown but no sync to logfiles either.

EDIT: I've forwarded that question to https://github.com/linrunner/TLP/issues/755 …but still no reply there.
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[Banana]

Your DE should be able to handle it.

There is also a DE independent way: https://superuser.com/questions/1057868/shutdown-a-linux-computer-depending-on-the-battery-level or udev rule https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop#Hibernate_on_low_battery_level
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[Massimo B.]

This system critical feature should be working without the DE, as well as other things like screen powermanagement and dimming. Often I power on the laptop for automatic backups and remote maintenance only, without logging in any DE.
Currently, Xorg already seems to power off the screen after a while, that's sufficient. Dimming does not work without the DE.
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[sublogic]

Maybe sys-power/acpid ? Back around 2005 I had a laptop using that, through a script at /etc/acpi/default.sh . No desktop environment back then, just X with ctwm as the window manager.

I don't remember if it could monitor battery levels, but it's worth a look. Also, I don't know if there are conflicts when you also run a desktop environment.

[flexibeast]

[Massimo B.]

I guess it's rather sys-power/upower:

[Spargeltarzan]

I use tlp many years now and it works pretty fine, I didn't notice any issues.

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