Framework Power Tuning

In this post we will go through the steps to achieve better battery life starting with using TLP, and then later in the post on how to make sure you have graphics acceleration for video playback so your battery usage while watching videos can be massivley decreased.

TLP

To start with we are going to want to install TLP, this will vary from distro to distro but I have listed a few common ones here below.

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# Fedora
dnf install tlp
# Need to remove the default PPD
dnf remove power-profiles-daemon

# Arch
pacman -Syu tlp

# Ubuntu
apt install tlp

After this we can configure the basic power saving settings, we are assuming you have intel_pstate driver which you can check with “cpupower frequency-info” and is the default for Arch, Fedora and Ubuntu. Load the below snippet into 01-basic.conf in /etc/tlp.d/

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# Set the governor to performance on AC power and Powersave on battery, we are using pstate so it's about as effective as Schedutil on the normal linux drivers.

CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_AC=performance
CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_BAT=powersave

# Set the CPU energy/performance policies, we don't want to use power because this limits the CPU freq to 400Mhz which gives very bad performance, so we put it to balance_power.
CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_AC=performance
CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT=balance_power

# Set intel CPU HWP dynamic boost, which gives us a slight increase in effiency. Remove this if your on AMD or not in intel_pstate
CPU_HWP_DYN_BOOST_ON_AC=1
CPU_HWP_DYN_BOOST_ON_BAT=1

Now the above is what gives us most of a boost, but the below you can also add. Please read the notes as some of it might not be wanted.

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# Tells the PCIE Active State Power Managment to basically try to preserve as much power as possible, mixed results with this as sometimes it works other times it doesn't. Make sure to test this one as sometimes it leads to a watt or 2 HIGHER usage.
PCIE_ASPM_ON_BAT=powersupersave

# Limits the Max Frequency of the CPU on AC power so that it doesn't overheat. Modify this value and see where you find the sweet spot due to the silicon lottery this will be diffrent for everybody. Note that in a multi core workload 2 cores will still hit 100C, while the rest for me stay at around 80 with this frequency.
CPU_SCALING_MAX_FREQ_ON_AC=4200000

# If your experiencing WiFi dropouts add the below to your config file, it will disable WiFi power saving mode. Personally I do not need to use this
WIFI_PWR_ON_BAT=off

Now go ahead and enable the service with “systemctl enable –now tlp” and you should be saving alot of power!. I hope this guide helped and if it did you can leave a star on the Repository. You can test how much power your device uses with my script Here

Enable GPU Acceleration

To enable GPU acceleration for any firefox based browser following the below steps

1. Install intel-media-driver

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# Fedora
dnf install intel-media-driver

# Arch
pacman -Syu intel-media-driver

# Ubuntu
apt install intel-media-va-driver

2. Check about:support and check if compositing value is “WebRender”, if it is not when we are in about:config later add gfx.webrender.all as a true value to force it to use it.
3. Go into about:support of your firefox browser by entering it into the URL bar.
4. Set “media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled” to true
5. If you are running wayland start firefox with the enviroment variable set “MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND” to 1.

Using GPU Acceleration before adding TLP dropped usage from about 15-20w to 10-13w.

• Note: For Fedora you will need to do some extra steps to get it working look at the Wiki.

Other Optimizations

Press FN + Space to disable Keyboard backlight which usually saves around 0.5w.

Results

This is at 50% brightness, using a 1TB SN770, 2x16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM, i5-1240p with 2xUSB-C and 1xUSB-A. For watching videos it is while watching a 1080p video on youtube.

Configuration:

• Hyprland
• Waybar
• Librewolf
• Neovim

Dotfiles

Other Guides

• Framework Official Guides: Ubuntu & Fedora

• Framework Forum Battery Life Thread

• Arch Linux Hardware Video Acceleration Wiki

• Arch Linux Framework Wiki