Fedora's Power Tweaks Dropped The Power Use On A ThinkPad By ~30%

Written by Michael Larabel in Fedora on 6 February 2018 at 07:36 AM EST. 24 Comments
FEDORA
Over the past few months Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been focusing on Linux power improvements, in particular to extend the battery life of laptops running Fedora Linux. As indicated by his presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2018, he's making great strides in that effort.

Among the areas that Hans has been pursuing for lowering Fedora's power consumption out-of-the-box includes working on Panel Self Refresh handling, SATA power management changes, enabling auto-suspend for more devices, and other work as part of this effort.

By enabling these features by default, he found the idle power consumption of a Lenovo ThinkPad T440s dropped from about 7.9 Watts down to 5.6 Watts, or a battery savings of nearly 30%.

Hans de Goede does acknowledge though that those manually tuning their systems with PowerTop or TLP may currently find similar results, but this is about improving the default/out-of-the-box behavior for Fedora.


Those curious to hear what else Hans had to say about the matter, his FOSDEM 2018 presentation is available via this WebM recording or the PDF slide deck.

I will be running some fresh Linux laptop battery comparison benchmarks shortly on Phoronix.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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