Seeing how my system sits idle for over 90% of the time, better power management options to cut down on energy consumption is an important topic to me. Especially in countries with high energy prices in Northern Europe.
I’d love to see a dedicated power management section to be added to the settings menu. The new menu should contain options to set the power governor-value and might also include a “–auto-tune” setting for Powertop. Maybe also move the options for HDD spin-down-times into this menu as well.
Yes, users should be able to activate the automatic “–auto-tune” option in powertop through the GUI. Also, powertop provides the ability to disable wake-on-lan that further helps to cut down on power usage.
Besides the powertop implementation, an option to select the power governor would also help.
List available governor states: cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
Show active governor state: cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
Set governor to e.i “powersave” state: echo powersave | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
Please note: Both the governor state and the powertop optimization are not persistent and are reset after a reboot. So a chronjob might be needed.
Just for comparison, on my test system I get an idle power draw of around 3,7W when using OpenMediaVault with Powertop and an “powersave" governor setting.
A clean install of Zima OS on the very same device idles at around 10W. So Zima OS is drawing 170% more power compared to an optimized setup.