Ubuntu is all about sane defaults, so shouldn’t we apply some of the awesome stuff that Fedora 28 has?
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/02/better-battery-life-on-fedora-linux
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Either that or at least preinstall tlp or make it a toggle/check in the installer like “is this a notebook? we recommend to install tlp and powertop then -> check here”. These packages give me 4 more ours on my xps!
But the best would be a solution like the one fedora has chosen.
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Or better still, autodetect the use of a notebook/laptop and ask if the user wishes for additional programs to be installed and for appropriate defaults to be applied that will enhance the performance of the device when running on battery power.
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We have taken a more conservative approach to power settings in the past, because we found that, for example, some disk controllers don’t respond well to being put in to a low power state and then woken up again. This has caused data loss in the past, and I’ve seen similar bug reports in Fedora.
Generally, we don’t like asking the user more questions than we have to and I don’t think most people would be fully aware of the implications of asking them to decide if their disk controller works well when put in to a low power state.
We’re especially interested in enabling suspend-to-idle:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/power/states.txt
as we think that will give the biggest improvement all round, but that’s only supported on newer hardware.
On our backlog for this cycle, the desktop team will be looking at power saving defaults in more depth. This will likely involve building a few test kernels with some of the power savings enabled and then asking people to test and report back on what they find. If you guys are up for some testing, this thread could be a good place to do that.
As a side note, we really need some fairly sophisticated power measuring equipment to get good data, but software reporting will have to do for now.
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Those are great news!
Are those disk controller issues affecting also SSDs? And do they come from the TLP package implementation? I’m just curious because I installed TLP and powertop on almost any notebook in my family =)
I am ofc up for some testing!
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I can’t remember exact details, but it was a while ago, so probably spinning rust. Re: drivers, these were kernel drivers which had the issues from what I remember.
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