2024-12-28 (Updated 2025-01-05)
I've been using tlp for a long time, before switching to power-profiles-daemon, because of pdd's ability to control user profiles on run time.
Nowadays I found it inconvenient because there's no way to change any configuration, so I decided to give the new sys-apps/tuned a try.
I'm using a window manager, so there's no dependency for it, I simply deselected and cleaned the package.
tuned is available in the Gentoo repository in testing branch at the time of writing, so we need to enable these packages:
# /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/custom
dev-python/python-linux-procfs ~amd64 # sys-apps/tuned dependency
sys-apps/tuned ~amd64
And then an emerge will merge the package.
After that, enable the tuned.service, and after a reboot, it should work automatically.
Gentoo's packaging forgot to add a /etc/tuned/profiles/, so make sure to mkdir that.
At the time of writing, tuned is still fairly new, so the documentation is heavily incomplete. But luckily the CLI is simple enough to figure out.
tuned-adm is used to control the daemon, and a GTK GUI tuned-gui is also available.
This is the part I came for. Tuned has a very nice feature that allows you to use output from powertop to optimize even more performance based on your specific hardware setup.
It also have inheritance, which mean you can make changes based on system default, this way you can have the base profile upgrade with software, and add your additions on your own.
Currently there isn't a manual page, but it's intuitive enough:
tuned-adm profile powersave # This will be the profile your new profile inherits from
powertop -r # Run powertop to collect variables to tune
powertop2tuned -i powertop.html -o <new_folder>
now inspect the file under <new_folder>, it should have a tuned.conf generated, with all options commented out.
All you need to do is un-comment the changes you desire, and cp -r the new folder to /etc/tuned/profiles/<profile_name>/
Then switch to it by using tuned-adm profile <profile_name>
This way I can achieve a stable 7W idle power consumption with rfkill block all and display back light set to 3/100
TODO