Improve and optimize battery life on Linux

Goal

Maximum battery life on linux within reasonable and acceptable daily workloads

Case study: Thinkpad x240 with 9cells battery on ubuntu 16.04

  • Before: from 100% to 5% - ~ 3.5hours

  • After installing TLP: ~ 5hours

Solution

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.

Please note: TLP runs on every laptop brand. Setting the battery charge thresholds is available for IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads only.

Installation

# Add PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt-get update

# Especially for thinkpad
sudo apt-get install tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-dkms

# Install
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw

Start: TLP will start automatically. To avoid having to restart the system, the first time you can start it manually by using the following command:

Check: Use the tlp-stat terminal command to check if TLP is working properly

Reference

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html

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