TLP

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• Laptop
• Laptop Mode Tools

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 fulfill your specific requirements.

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 and socket systemd-rfkill.socket to avoid conflicts and assure proper operation of TLP's radio device switching options.

Note: tlp.service starts NetworkManager.service if it is available: FS#43733. If you use a different network manager, mask NetworkManager.service or edit tlp.service and remove the service out of line Wants=.

ThinkPads only

For advanced battery functions, i.e. charge thresholds and recalibration, install the following package(s):

• tp_smapi – tp-smapi is needed for battery charge thresholds, recalibration and specific status output of tlp-stat
• acpi_call – acpi-call is needed for battery charge thresholds and recalibration on Sandy Bridge and newer models (X220/T420, X230/T430 et al.)

See the TLP FAQ, section "Which kernel module?", for details.

Controlling the charge thresholds using D-Bus without root privileges is possible using threshy^AUR and it's example Qt user interface threshy-gui^AUR.

Graphical interface

tlpui-git^AUR is a GTK user interface for TLP written in Python. Software is currently in beta.

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.

Force battery (BAT) configuration

When no power supply can be detected, the setting for AC will be used (e.g. on desktops and embedded hardware).

You may want to force the battery (BAT) settings when using TLP on these devices to enable more power saving:

/etc/default/tlp

# Operation mode when no power supply can be detected: AC, BAT.
TLP_DEFAULT_MODE=BAT

# Operation mode select: 0=depend on power source, 1=always use TLP_DEFAULT_MODE
TLP_PERSISTENT_DEFAULT=1

Btrfs

To avoid filesystem corruption on btrfs formatted partitions, set:

SATA_LINKPWR_ON_BAT=max_performance

See also these links for discussion on this topic: Github bug report, Reddit follow-up discussion.

Bumblebee with NVIDIA driver

If you're running Bumblebee with NVIDIA driver, you need to disable power management for the GPU in TLP in order to make Bumblebee control the power of the GPU.

Run lspci to determine the address of the GPU (such as 01:00.0), then set the value:

 RUNTIME_PM_BLACKLIST="01:00.0"

Radio Device Wizard

The Radio Device Wizard allows a more sophisticated management of radio devices depending on network connect/disconnect events. It requires NetworkManager, tlp-rdw and enabling NetworkManager-dispatcher.service.

See TLP configuration for details.

Command line

TLP provides several command line tools. See TLP commands.

Disk problems after suspend

There may be cases where the default tlp configuration can cause SATA-related problems that you can see on dmesg -a. Some systems may not support the SATA_LINKPWR_ON_AC parameters.

As an example, MacBook Air 2015 11" doesn't support the max_performance parameter, and so had to be changed to min_power:

# SATA_LINKPWR_ON_AC="med_power_with_dipm max_performance"
SATA_LINKPWR_ON_AC="med_power_with_dipm min_power"

Debugging

You can display information about the currently used Mode(AC/BAT) and applied configurations:

 # tlp-stat

Features intentionally excluded

• Fan control. See Fan speed control

• Backlight brightness. See Backlight

See also

• TLP - Linux Advanced Power Management - Project homepage & documentation.