Some of these may apply to all laptops and some may be frame.work specific, but I thought I would throw them out there to help folks out.
- Remove any of your modules that aren’t usb-c. At least the microsd and HDMI modules pull a small amount of power and prevent the laptop from going into the lowest power saving levels. Without doing this, I never get pc10 (the lowest power saving mode). framework is working on fixing this in a upcoming bios update.
- Turn off the camera and microphone with the switches at the top of the display. Again, these draw a small amount of power and keep things from going to lowest power settings.
- dynamic power profiles powersave mode is much better in my testing than tlp or tuned for saving power. It’s also easy to manage with workstation/gnome desktop. Others can use the powerprofilesctl command line tool.
- powertop –auto-tune (or simply ‘systemctl enable powertop’ and reboot) seems to work ok on the framework laptops, with one exception: If you disable bluetooth and then try and re-enable it, it will find no controller. You will need to do a cold boot (completely power off and back on) or ‘rmmod btusb; modprobe btusb enable_autosuspend=n’ to get it back.
- ‘echo powersupersave > /sys/module/pcie_aspm/parameters/policy’ provides some power savings and to me at least doesn’t seem to cause much in the way of slowdowns.
- Make sure you aren’t hitting this bug in firefox ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1936901 ) which basically causes it to start speech-dispatcher and then never ever let it go away. This was causing about 3-5% cpu use here, but it also causes fans to start up and no power savings to happen.
- If you don’t mind using rpmfusion-nonfree items, installing intel-media-driver from there helps video playback nicely (depending on the video).
- bluetooth and wifi both use a fair bit of power, if you don’t need them, do disable them for more savings.
Hope that helps someone out there get more battery life… 🙂