4.2. Example — Laptop
One other very common place where power management and savings can really make a difference are laptops. As laptops by design normally already use drastically less energy than workstations or servers the potential for absolute savings are less than for other machines. When in battery mode, though, any saving can help to get a few more minutes of battery life out of a laptop. Although this section focuses on laptops in battery mode, but you certainly can still use some or all of those tunings while running on AC power as well.
Savings for single components usually make a bigger relative difference on laptops than they do on workstations. For example, a 1 Gbit/s network interface running at 100 Mbits/s saves around 3–4 watts. For a typical server with a total power consumption of around 400 watts, this saving is approximately 1 %. On a laptop with a total power consumption of around 40 watts, the power saving on just this one component amounts to 10 % of the total.
Specific power-saving optimizations on a typical laptop include:
- Configure the system BIOS to disable all hardware that you do not use. For example, parallel or serial ports, card readers, webcams, WiFi, and Bluetooth just to name a few possible candidates.
- Dim the display in darker environments where you do not need full illumination to read the screen comfortably. Use +
on the GNOME desktop, +++ on the KDE desktop; or gnome-power-manager or xbacklight at the command line; or the function keys on your laptop.
Additionally, (or alternatively) you can perform many small adjustments to various system settings:
- use the
ondemandgovernor (enabled by default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7) - enable AC97 audio power-saving (enabled by default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7):
~]#
echo Y > /sys/module/snd_ac97_codec/parameters/power_save - enable USB auto-suspend:
~]#
for i in /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/power/autosuspend; do echo 1 > $i; doneNote that USB auto-suspend does not work correctly with all USB devices. - mount file system using relatime (default in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7):
~]#
mount -o remount,relatime mountpoint - reduce screen brightness to
50or less, for example:~]$
xbacklight -set 50 - activate DPMS for screen idle:
~]$
xset +dpms; xset dpms 0 0 300 - deactivate Wi-Fi:
~]#
echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/*/rf_kill
