TLP, the popular free and open-source laptop battery saving tool, announced the 1.6 Beta release!
In the new release, TLP adds ‘Battery Care’ (charge thresholds) support for System76 and Toshiba/Dynabook laptops. Meaning when power supply is connected, it automatically starts charging only when battery level is below given threshold, and stops charging when reached threshold.
TLP 1.6 also improved AMD Zen 2 or newer CPUs support, it now supports configuring AMD CPU power mode (e.g., balanced, power-save, performance) when on AC or battery power.
The release as well added ‘MEM_SLEEP_ON_AC‘ and ‘MEM_SLEEP_ON_BAT‘ to configure system suspend mode between Suspend-to-Idle (s2idle) and Suspend-to-RAM (deep).
The CPU frequency scaling driver mode (Intel intel_pstate, AMD amd-pstate driver) is also configurable in the release. It’s done by settings value of “CPU_DRIVER_OPMODE_ON_AC” and “CPU_DRIVER_OPMODE_ON_BAT” to active, passive, or guided. For AMD CPUs, Linux Kernel 6.3/6.4 is required.
Other changes in TLP 1.6 Beta include:
- Properly detect librebooted thinkpads.
- ZSH command completion
- Remove SCHED_POWERSAVE_ON_AC/BAT.
- DEVICES_TO_ENABLE/DISABLE_ON_SHUTDOWN and USB_AUTOSUSPEND_DISABLE_ON_SHUTDOWN deprecated.
How to Get TLP 1.6 in your Linux
TLP is available in most Linux system repositories. Just install it via your system package manager, though it may be old.
For the release note, as well as the source code:
For Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and their based systems, there’s also an official Beta PPA available. Which, so far supports Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.04, and Ubuntu 23.10.
Just open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the commands below one by one to add the PPA and TLP:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp-beta sudo apt update sudo apt install tlp
When one, just forget it, the default settings are already optimized for battery life. Or, you may run man tlp to get command line options, or edit /etc/tlp.conf to configure it for your specific requirements.