This is just a FYI for those who, like me (and the maintainers of the Fedora guide), recommend TLP over Power Profile Daemon and Powertop.
I have been experiencing a degradation on the efficiency of the laptop, and a very noticeable power drain when the laptop is suspended over the last few weeks. I assumed this was due to newer kernels delivered over time and I tweaked with the suspend modes (to idle or to memory), but with not very good results.
The TLP 1.5 packages from the official Fedora repositories for F38 do not currently work:
When changing the power source, the profile settings are not applied
RDW does not work
Trace mode does not work
Cause are SELinux AVCs when trying to read the configuration. For this reason upstream support for Fedora via the Issue tracker is currently not possible. There will be no 1.6 Beta packages as well.
Please open Fedora bugs for the AVCs.
Probably an alternative configuration for PPD and Powertop (which I am doing basically to follow the defaults and recommendations) would be a nice to have thing for the time being, as apparently TLP is broken.
On my end, I’ve restored PPD and installed powertop as a service that does the auto tune in the background. I will post my impressions on whether or not this set up has improved my experience.
DId anyone bother to verify that this is generating SELinux alerts? Usually at the time of a new Fedora release there are often some packages that fall through and take a week or two at most to resolve. This may have been the case with the release of Fedora 38 and TLP. I am currently running Fedora 38 (since release day) and have not experienced this. Neither can I find any record of any SELinux alerts regarding it on my system.
I would recommend either dnf install setroubleshoot which will install a GUI package for troubleshooting SELinux issues or you can run on cli ausearch -m avc which will show all your SELinux alerts that would be blocking anything. Both will require sudo permissions.
TLP is running just fine on my system. @gvisoc could you please post any logs you have regarding this issue or did you just go off of what was on TLP’s documentation? As we all know documentation is the last thing to get updated.
Question, did the drain also become noticeable outside of suspend? TLP primarily focuses on power management when the system is running, not specifically during suspend.
My own experience matches @nadb’s experience with TLP running just fine on 38.
@gvisoc If you can add your experience and steps to replicate to the filed ticket, this would help us out. We’d want to see more about draining during usage and SELinux alerts than experiences with suspend, which are a different item.
I will also reach out to the Fedora team myself and verify if we might see the latest TLP release for Fedora 39 - I suspect it could happen, as there is likely going to be a lot of activity with this release.
I can see that the version 1.6.0 build on Rawhide was built with scratch = True on the linked page. That means the build is a scratch build. It’s not official build. And scratch build’s RPM packages on the linked page will be gone after some term.
I was not noticing excessive drains during operation of the laptop, just the battery reporting a full discharge in less time than before (about 6 hours instead of the usual 10 to 12 when typing markdown with wifi on), and there was nothing in the logs in terms of errors or similar. I guess that, if anything, there would be missing logs.
I suspect that some the system is going to suspend state OK, but some devices are left in a higher power state. For what is worth, my laptop is a 1360P with 64GB RAM, a 2TB Crucial P5 Plus with self encryption, and the expansion cards are 3 USB-C and 1 USB-A.
Currently I am no longer with TLP, so can’t really grab logs for now, but I have measurements:
PPD and Powertop, suspend to idle (s2idle) for 9:45 hours goes from 99% to 95%.
TLP, suspend to memory (deep), drain was of 1.55% an hour, so for 9:45 hours it would have drained down to about 83-84%.
TLP, suspend to idle (s2idle) the drain was about 2.8%/hour
I will run the laptop like this for a while and will try to go back to TLP to see if I can reproduce.
Okay. as a reminder, if someone really wants to see the tlp RPM package to be upgraded to the Rawhide (Fedora 40) and backported and Fedora 39, 38, someone can contribute to the rpms/tlp’s git repository by sending pull-requests such as GitHub to make it happen. Below are documents.
There are a couple of reasons this could be happening off the top of my head. 1) There were some changes to terms used in the tlp.conf file which could lead to parts not suspending properly. The release notes go over these changes. 2) TLP had a major version change which generally means if you were using the tlp.conf as your primary configuration it got overwritten during the upgrade. The preferred safe method is to use a configuration file that should be located at /etc/tlp.d/mycustomconfigurationfile.conf this prevents your config from getting overwritten.