There are various tweaks that you can apply to your laptop to save battery power, but many of them depend on the hardware, Linux distribution, some are outdated or too hard to apply for regular users and so on. TLP is an advanced power management command line tool for Linux that tries to apply these settings / tweaks for you automatically, depending on your Linux distribution and hardware.

• 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 management 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 TLP 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;
• Undervolting of Intel processors – requires kernel with PHC-Patch;
• Battery charge thresholds – ThinkPads only;
• Recalibrate battery – ThinkPads only.

Install TLP in Ubuntu

Before proceeding with the installation, there are a couple of things you need to do:

• firstly, if you’ve added any power saving settings / scripts (e.g.: in /etc/rc.local), remove them or else TLP may not work properly;
• remove laptop-mode-tools (“sudo apt-get remove laptop-mode-tools”).

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw

sudo tlp start

• smartmontools – needed to display disk drive S.M.A.R.T. data;
• ethtool – needed to disable wake on lan.

sudo apt-get install smartmontools ethtool

• tp-smapi-dkms – needed for battery charge thresholds and ThinkPad specific status output of tlp-stat;
• acpi-call-tools – acpi-call is needed for battery charge thresholds on Sandy Bridge and newer models (X220/T420, X230/T430, etc.).

Install these packages using the following command:

sudo apt-get install tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-tools

Make sure to also read the TLP FAQ.

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