I saw really big power savings when I started using TuneD. Such a huge upgrade for Linux users! From 8 months ago, going from 120 -> 85W. More recently got my desktop down to 65, yay. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42636350
There's also API compatibility with the power-profiles-daemon, which didn't ever help me that much (I'd also done some basic tuning myself), and which has been unmaintained for a while now. But there's still a variety of utilities which target the old ppd.
There is something a bit wacky about a performance service implemented in an interpreted language like Python whether it is tuned or auto-cpufreq. Tuned does seem to be as good as it gets for the moment.
x86 cpus don't have the power efficiency to do the work we now expect of them in thin and light laptops with difficult thermal constraints. You can push them one way or another. You can have them fast with a fan like a jet engine or you can have them cold and running like a 10 year old computer or put the dial somewhere inbetween but there is only so much you can do.
I haven't tested Intel's efficiency cores (E-cores) myself - would these address the need for desktops/laptops?
Apple and many arm mobile platforms also have a mix of performance and efficiency cores so it seems to be a proven approach. I guess it comes down to implementation. Intel's efficiency cores by themselves (eg N series) apparently make nice little appliances, often better value than something like a RPi. I don't know how much they help their higher performance devices conserve energy.
I have one of Intel's old desktop class processors in a refurbished ex-office mini-desktop plugged into a power meter running a few services for the household and the idle usage isn't terrible. I don't understand why my laptop doesn't run colder and longer given the years of development between them.
There is also the race to idle strategy where you spike the performance cores to get back to idle which probably works well with a lot of office usage but not so well with something more demanding like games or benchmarks.
I've used `tuned` a lot. It's really extremely good for personal machines/workstations, and really okay for servers. In my case I'm almost 50/50 with it in professional cases, where 50% of the time I had a real good time with it, and 50% of the time I turned it off and used startup scripts (like cloud-init per-boot and whatnot).
Overall, I'd say give it a shot as it can be really powerful and I do actually like it. Don't be afraid to go 'no, I know how to do this better, myself' and turn it off though.
I disable it whenever setting up a new system. It gets irq bindings for networking wrong every single time, and moves irqs around in ways that defeats the whole point of having per CPU queues. Not sure why that behaviour is enabled by default as it makes no sense.
Please lodge a bug because I seem to think the same way but lack the larger deployment experience to explain how to do it more generally than my tiny use case.
It's easier to uninstall it. There's nothing good that tuned has ever done for me.
FYI: messing with irq bindings for per-cpu queues of nics has been a bug for at least 16 years depending on the nic. FYI: Intel launched the 82599 back in 2009.
Clueless software developers should not be messing with kernel settings like irq bindings. Software that does that is not worth my time.
Hmm, started looking into this and realized I already had tlp running, and that supports limiting maximum charge on the battery in the laptop. I didn't seem to see anything equivalent in the tuned documentation, but I did see the presets… and finding things like SAP Hana makes me think this isn't aimed at laptops…
one hot tip is that tuned has a translation tool for power-profiles-daemon, meaning you can change the profile via gnome / kde
What I'd like is a tool that can be run on a fresh linux install to show what's not working correctly and maybe some diagnostics. Does that exist?
Things like suspend to RAM/disk working, GPU performance is reasonable, WiFi and disk speeds aren't slower than expected.
> Things like suspend to RAM [...] working
If you're on and AMD laptop then suspend to ram can be tested with amd-debug-tools[0].
> WiFi
Here[1] is a list of public iperf3 servers. You can test your connection speed with (change host name and port to appropriate server):
# Test upload speed
iperf3 -c host-name-here -p 5201
# Test download speed
iperf3 -c host-name-here -p 5201 -R
iperf3 -s -p 5201
[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/superm1/amd-debug-tools.git/about/
[1] https://iperf.fr/iperf-servers.php