powersave

My configuration for maximizing the battery life on my Thinkpad T530.

Included here is a systemd service file, various config-lets and a few utilities to set or control certain power saving features. I set as much as I can statically on boot; I think its silly to increase power consumption simply because I'm on AC power.

Also look at my backlight utilities. The lightd daemon is useful to automatically manage/dim the backlight.

A PKGBUILD is included as a convenience.

modprobe.d/powersave.conf

Enable power_save=1 for snd_hda_intel

sysctl.d/powersave.conf

• disable NMI watchdog
• set laptop mode
• increase the dirty writeback time

rules.d/50-network-powersave.rules

Set the powersaving features on network devices that must be enabled by 3rd-party commands. For every detected device:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="net", KERNEL=="eth*", RUN+="/usr/sbin/ethtool -s %k wol d"
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="net", KERNEL=="wlan*", RUN+="/usr/sbin/iw dev %k set power_save on"

NOTE: this assumes modern Linux wireless drivers. There's no guarantee about naming of devices.

rules.d/50-pci-powersave.rules

Enable pci powersaving features:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="pci", ATTR{power/control}="auto"

rules.d/50-sata-powersave.rules

Enable sata powersaving features:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_host", ATTR{link_power_management_policy}="min_power"

rules.d/50-usb-powersave.rules

Enable powersaving and autosuspend on usb ports:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", TEST=="power/autosuspend", ATTR{power/autosuspend}="1"
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="auto"