Laptop Mode Tools

I am pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools at version 1.66.

This release fixes an important bug in the way Laptop Mode Tools is invoked. Users, now when disable it in the config file, the tool will be disabled. Thanks to bendlas @github for narrowing it down. The GUI configuration tool has been improved, thanks to Juan. And there is a new power saving module for users with ATI Radeon cards. Thanks to M. Ziebell for submitting the patch.

I am very pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools , at version 1.65

This release took a toll given things have been changing for me, both personally and professionally. 1.64 was released on September 1st, 2013. So it was a full 9 month period, of which a good 2-3 months were procrastination. That said, this release has some pretty good bug fixes and I urge all distribution packagers to push it to their repositories soon. While I ’d thank all contributors who have helped make this release, a special thank you to Stefan Huber. Stefan found/fixed many issues, did the messy code clean up etc.. Thank you.

I just released Laptop Mode Tools @ version 1.64. And am pleased to introduce the new graphical utility to toggle individual power saving modules in the package.

The GUI is written using the PyQT Toolkit and the options in the GUI are generated at runtime, based on the list of available power saving modules.

Apart from the GUI configuration tool, this release also includes some bug fixes:

• Don’t touch USB Controller power settings. The individual devices, when plugged in, while on battery, inherit the power settings from the USB controller
• start-stop-programs: add support for systemd. Thanks to Alexander Mezin
• Replace hardcoded path to udevadm with “which udevadm”. Thanks to Alexander Mezin
• Honor .conf files only. Thanks to Sven Köhler
• Make ‘/usr/lib’ path configurable. This is especially useful for systems that use /usr/lib64, or /lib64 directly. Thanks to Nicolas Braud-Santoni
• Don’t call killall with the -g argument. Thanks to Murray Campbell
• Fix RPM Spec file build errors

The Debian package will follow soon. I don’t intend to introduce a new package for the GUI tool because the source is hardly 200 lines. So the dependencies (pyqt packages) will go as Recommeds or Suggests

The power consumption on the Linux kernel 3.10 is pretty bad.

On kernel 3.10, with the follwing config, the PowerTop results are:

#

# Timers subsystem

#

CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT=y

CONFIG_NO_HZ_COMMON=y

# CONFIG_HZ_PERIODIC is not set

CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE=y

# CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL is not set

CONFIG_NO_HZ=y

CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS=y

PowerTOP v2.0 Overview Idle stats Frequency stats Device stats Tunables

The battery reports a discharge rate of 28.0 W

The estimated remaining time is 23 minutes

Summary: 1785.5 wakeups/second, 0.0 GPU ops/second, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 22.1% CPU use

Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.61, has been released and will land up soon for Debian. This is the version that would be targetting Wheezy.
This release includes many bug fixes and should make power savings much better on your machines.

This is mainly a bug fix release. Some parallel module execution approach has been used which could show runtime improvements.

Changelog:

1.61 - Thu May 17 17:44:26 IST 2012
* Handle devices with persistent device naming. This fixes the issues where
you don’t have a disk referenced by a block name, the commit= value was
completely skipped
* Fix issue where hdparm skips SSDs for power management
* Add parallel execution for the modules. In theory this should speeden up the
execution. See git commit log comments for details
* Add support for non-deafult customized settings
* calculate design_capacity_warning on machines/arches where it is not readily
available

Hello World,

I am very pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.60.
This release includes lots of bug fixes and should make power savings much better on your machines.The battery polling daemon now, more reliably, gets triggered and killed based on power states.

This release also includes 2 helper scripts to trigger suspend and hibernate, in case anyone is interested.

Given the advancements of Linux PM ( All thanks to Rafael J. Wysocki ) in recent years, the freezer/thawfunctionality really does a very good job of handling suspend/hibernate, there is no need of a hacky suspend/resumemechanism. Thus, you’ll notice the helper scripts just do a mere echo into sysfs.

I just released laptop-mode-tools version 1.56.

This release adds many goodies. We now have a better calling application to rely upon, udev. The linux kernel generates many events based on conditions. udev is a framework that acts on those events and can call-in applications based on conditions. This is something I wanted to do for laptop- mode-tools.

Power State

First was power state. The power_supply subsystem can sense changes and generate events. We simply act on the change action here and call in laptop-mode-tools because we want laptop-mode-tools run on both ON_AC and ON_BAT