01.org has several projects related to power management, but most aren't in Fedora repositories. Are any of these useful for the recent effort to make power management better on Fedora?
I've been compiling thermald from source for a while, and it does make a difference to battery life and heat generation on laptops. It's only in copr and that version is old.
The description of thermal daemon: "This is an active open source project distributed under the LGPL open source license. With a mature and established codebase containing about 12,000 lines of code.
Linux Therman Daemon is currently used in distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora and can be used any Linux-based system, including Chromium, Chrome OS or Android."
Except it's not used in Fedora. Intel is the maintainer upstream. Seems like a strong candidate for default installation and activation on Fedora Workstation.
Next up is Powertop, which I've used off and on mostly for diagnostic. But it also has some startup time optimizations applied with a systemd unit. *shrug* I can't quantify how useful those optimizations are. The one in Fedora right now is the previous version which doesn't work on Skylake or Kabylake CPUs.
RAPL Power Meter I've never used.
suspendresume I hadn't even heard of until looking at this page just now, but the description sounds like it'd useful for both workstation and server products.
"The use of Suspend/Resume is an excellent way to save power in Linux platforms, whether in Intel® based mobile devices or large-scale server farms. Optimizing the performance of suspend/resume has become extremely important because the more time spent entering and exiting low power modes, the less the system can be in use."
There's also tuned, another way to set lots of kernel bits. I think it was an accepted feature for a previous Fedora release, but it's off by default, and it is only mentioned in the Fedora 20 power saving guide, which seems to have disappeared entirely for Fedora 21+:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Power_Management_Guide/t...
It would be really nice to have something on by default. I certainly don't want to go through the laundry list of tunables and profiles every time I install a Fedora system. The big thing that has prevented this previously, as I understand, is the possibility to expose power management bugs, breaking things for some users.
In my experience some of the powertop settings make quite a big difference. Out of the box on my haswell laptop, Fedora never enters any package state lower than C2. Just turning on SATA link power management, for example, allows it to enter C3 and saves a few watts.
On 04/07/2017 03:47 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
01.org has several projects related to power management, but most aren't in Fedora repositories. Are any of these useful for the recent effort to make power management better on Fedora?
I've been compiling thermald from source for a while, and it does make a difference to battery life and heat generation on laptops. It's only in copr and that version is old.
The description of thermal daemon: "This is an active open source project distributed under the LGPL open source license. With a mature and established codebase containing about 12,000 lines of code.
Linux Therman Daemon is currently used in distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora and can be used any Linux-based system, including Chromium, Chrome OS or Android."
Except it's not used in Fedora. Intel is the maintainer upstream. Seems like a strong candidate for default installation and activation on Fedora Workstation.
Next up is Powertop, which I've used off and on mostly for diagnostic. But it also has some startup time optimizations applied with a systemd unit. *shrug* I can't quantify how useful those optimizations are. The one in Fedora right now is the previous version which doesn't work on Skylake or Kabylake CPUs.
RAPL Power Meter I've never used.
suspendresume I hadn't even heard of until looking at this page just now, but the description sounds like it'd useful for both workstation and server products.
"The use of Suspend/Resume is an excellent way to save power in Linux platforms, whether in Intel® based mobile devices or large-scale server farms. Optimizing the performance of suspend/resume has become extremely important because the more time spent entering and exiting low power modes, the less the system can be in use."
On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 5:37 PM, Thomas Daede bztdlinux@gmail.com wrote:
There's also tuned, another way to set lots of kernel bits. I think it was an accepted feature for a previous Fedora release, but it's off by default, and it is only mentioned in the Fedora 20 power saving guide, which seems to have disappeared entirely for Fedora 21+:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Power_Management_Guide/t...
It would be really nice to have something on by default. I certainly don't want to go through the laundry list of tunables and profiles every time I install a Fedora system. The big thing that has prevented this previously, as I understand, is the possibility to expose power management bugs, breaking things for some users.
In my experience some of the powertop settings make quite a big difference. Out of the box on my haswell laptop, Fedora never enters any package state lower than C2. Just turning on SATA link power management, for example, allows it to enter C3 and saves a few watts.
Thermald is claimed by Intel to be mature, so that seems pretty straight forward. I wonder if that'll put it in C3, or if that just tames things down when the CPU starts to get warm (why the kernel doesn't do this or the CPU itself I do not understand but beside the point).
Powertop, maybe it ought to be a feature request for F27, and see if a bunch of bug reports happen during the beta *shrug*. I've used it on an ancient and new laptop, of different manufacture, and haven't had a problem. But of course if it puts e.g. USB bus to sleep and there's a bug preventing it from waking up when someone plugs a flash drive in, that'd be pretty annoying as default behavior if this is a possibility.
On 04/07/2017 05:04 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
Powertop, maybe it ought to be a feature request for F27, and see if a bunch of bug reports happen during the beta *shrug*. I've used it on an ancient and new laptop, of different manufacture, and haven't had a problem. But of course if it puts e.g. USB bus to sleep and there's a bug preventing it from waking up when someone plugs a flash drive in, that'd be pretty annoying as default behavior if this is a possibility.
Powertop by itself doesn't set any tunables on boot - it's more of a debugging tool. While that means it won't break anything, it also will have no effect for most users, making it mostly uninteresting as a feature request.
For stuff like framebuffer compression, the Intel driver only enables it on sufficiently new hardware where it's expected bugs are less likely. Maybe some similar heuristic could be used for setting default tunables, but I'm not sure what it would be without specific examples.
thermald seems to be something else entirely - it's for thermal throttling. This might prevent the thermal MCE's that pop up when my machine overheats, but as far as I can tell is an independent issue.
On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 6:41 PM, Thomas Daede bztdlinux@gmail.com wrote:
On 04/07/2017 05:04 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
Powertop, maybe it ought to be a feature request for F27, and see if a bunch of bug reports happen during the beta *shrug*. I've used it on an ancient and new laptop, of different manufacture, and haven't had a problem. But of course if it puts e.g. USB bus to sleep and there's a bug preventing it from waking up when someone plugs a flash drive in, that'd be pretty annoying as default behavior if this is a possibility.
Powertop by itself doesn't set any tunables on boot
There is a systemd unit that runs powertop with --auto-tune
For stuff like framebuffer compression, the Intel driver only enables it on sufficiently new hardware where it's expected bugs are less likely. Maybe some similar heuristic could be used for setting default tunables, but I'm not sure what it would be without specific examples.
thermald seems to be something else entirely - it's for thermal throttling. This might prevent the thermal MCE's that pop up when my machine overheats, but as far as I can tell is an independent issue.
It does prevent the thermal MCE warnings on one of my laptops; seems to more aggressively throttle that machine while also maybe ramping up the fans sooner.
I had bad experience with enabling powertop' service - USB mice and headphones don't work very well with that. But I am using tuned (tuned-gtk) for few years and I didn't notice any issues (top-battery) profile. I see that my Haswell laptop is using both C2 and C3 power-saving states.
Maybe this can become default?
On 04/09/2017 02:39 AM, František Zatloukal wrote:
I had bad experience with enabling powertop' service - USB mice and headphones don't work very well with that. But I am using tuned (tuned-gtk) for few years and I didn't notice any issues (top-battery) profile. I see that my Haswell laptop is using both C2 and C3 power-saving states.
Do you know which powertop tunable was the one to cause issues? We should make a note to avoid it (or the tuned or tlp equivalent)
I didn't test enabling options separately, but only "Enable automatic suspend for USB Device $name" looks like it has to do anything with these issues. I don't this option in tuned.
2017-04-10 23:53 GMT+02:00 Thomas Daede bztdlinux@gmail.com:
On 04/09/2017 02:39 AM, František Zatloukal wrote:
I had bad experience with enabling powertop' service - USB mice and
headphones don't work very well with that. But I am using tuned (tuned-gtk) for few years and I didn't notice any issues (top-battery) profile. I see that my Haswell laptop is using both C2 and C3 power-saving states.
Do you know which powertop tunable was the one to cause issues? We should make a note to avoid it (or the tuned or tlp equivalent) _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
On 4/9/17 4:39 AM, František Zatloukal wrote:
I had bad experience with enabling powertop' service - USB mice and headphones don't work very well with that. But I am using tuned (tuned-gtk) for few years and I didn't notice any issues (top-battery) profile. I see that my Haswell laptop is using both C2 and C3 power-saving states.
I had trouble with powertop putting my USB APC UPS (Three TLA's!) into low power mode - that made it unhappy. Maybe a blacklisting system is needed? It's a pity to not tune all the things that do work due to the few things that don't ...
-Eric
On Fri, Apr 07, 2017 at 04:47:54PM -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
01.org has several projects related to power management, but most aren't in Fedora repositories. Are any of these useful for the recent effort to make power management better on Fedora?
If you're packaging things, it'd be nice to have TLP in Fedora for all of us Thinkpad users:
http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html
Actually TLP is included in Fedora already. Unfortunately it requires two (at least) out of tree kernel modules to really make it functional, so the work is resolving why those aren't upstream and what it would take to get them upstream. These enable setting battery thresholds, which can really prolong the life of laptop batteries.
I should also note that the link above has a Fedora repo, but it's been uninstallable for me for a little while.
And yes, I know I should be doing the work ...
Rich.