power-profiles-daemon for openSUSE Leap 15.3?

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1

Hi All,

I am using the latest KDE Plasma workspaces 5.23.1 release on kernel 5.14 from official KDE and Kernel backports OpenSUSE repositories without any issues on Leap 15.3. I was reading the changelog of Plasma workspaces and found that a new interface has been introduced in powerdevil to select power profiles from the Battery and Brightness panel.

But that requires the power-profiles-daemon package to be installed, which I see as only available on Tumbleweed. It requires glibc 2.34 while Leap has 2.31. Is there any way to make this package work on Leap 15.3 or any plans to backport it?

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I read this as you are looking for some support, but you posted in an area entitled “Looking for Something Other Than Support”. I am going to try to move this to applications area of our forum.

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Ok - I moved this thread to ‘applications’ and left a redirect (in the previous forum area) in for 1-week.

As to your support request …

This is an unusual approach, using the latest KDE Plasma 5.23.1 with openSUSE-15.3, instead of going to Tumbleweed. Most, who want more functionality with a more cutting edge KDE would go to Tumbleweed.

As for ability introduced in powerdevil to select power profiles - I assume you might be referring to posts such as this ( https://pointieststick.com/2021/07/23/this-week-in-kde-power-profiles-and-a-more-polished-kickoff/ ) which refers to this ( https://invent.kde.org/plasma/powerdevil/-/merge_requests/49 ) in powerdevil.

A caution about this. My understanding/experience is that openSUSE-15.3 uses TLP for battery life management. Nominally its default settings are optimized for battery life (and it will have no presetup configuration file upon openSUSE-15.3 installation) although purportedly TLP is highly configurable.

Note that according to the TLP faq ( https://linrunner.de/tlp/faq/installation.html ) that power-profiles-daemon.service prevents TLP from making power saving settings at system startup and hence if using TLP it is recommended to disable power-profiles-daemon. Hence even if you were able to build/install power-profiles-daemon, it may cause issues with your laptop’s battery power saving - making matters worse in an effort to obtain some desired feature.

I don’t know the SuSE-GmbH/openSUSE packagers plans for the future, if they will stick with TLP (and not install power-profiles-daemon), or if they will come up with some TLP configuration file to work with power-profiles-daemon, or if they will abandon TLP and use an app such as thermald instead of TLP with power-profiles-daemon (which may not be a viable approach ?? ).

If you wish to persist in spite of these potential problems, I suppose you could try to build power-profiles-daemon yourself with an app such as ‘rpm-build’. I do so on occasion myself (for example I built a custom ‘FreeFileSync’ for my laptop running openSUSE-15.3 when the normal packagers of that app did not provide such for openSUSE-15.3 when they had build issues).

But ‘rpm-build’ is a hit-and-miss way to build, and most packagers likely shake their head at it and I think most would recommend against using ‘rpm-build’. It requires the .src file (for a previously build version (such as that of Tumbleweed) for ‘power-profiles’daemon’, and then in my experience many iterative efforts to build the desired rpm, as one has to gradually solve all the various failed dependencies, installing various .devel rpms for different applications during the iterative build attempts. You also note a glibc potential issue, and I do not know if the newer glibc is a power-profiles-daemon build requirement (ie will it build against an older glibc)?

… And as noted, in this case, even if you succeed to build, it may not work with TLP.

Apologies that I can not offer more help, but this is pretty much the extent of my knowledge on this specific topic.

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Wow, that was a pretty insightful reply, thanks a lot for that. Well, i installed a Tumbleweed installation side by side and spent some time with it and liked it for my usage. Upgraded my main install to Tumbleweed just now. Another happy camper :slight_smile:

As for power-profiles-daemon, any idea about the plan for Tumbleweed? I have been using TLP since ages on Fedora and OpenSUSE and don’t have any issues with it. I just thought it would be nice to have that power save profile available to switch at will to it.

Sorry for not replying sooner.

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Glad to read you like Tumbleweed.

I confess, I don’t use Tumbleweed much. I have Tumbleweed installed on a test partition on my desktop PC, and about once/month I boot to Tumbleweed, and update it, play with it for maybe 20 minutes and then go for another month before touching it again. I do this month after month after month. So clearly I am not one for using Tumbleweed much.

In fact, I am far from a cutting edge hardware/software user.

Both my desktop PCs run openSUSE-LEAP-15.2 and my old Toshiba Z930 laptop runs LEAP-15.2 also. However just over a month ago I purchased a new Lenovo X1 Carbon Generation-9 (X1C9) laptop, and because of its newer Tiger Lake CPU/processor with Iris graphics, I decided I needed newer GNU/Linux software than LEAP-15.2 … and I had to choose between Tumbleweed or LEAP-15.3. I researched a lot prior to installing openSUSE and I decided I could get away with going for LEAP-15.3 with some isolated upgrades (to handle the X1C9’s more cutting edge hardware). I ended up upgrading the kernel to 5.14.11 (from LEAP-15.3’s 5.3.18 kernel) and upgrading XOrg/Xwindows. However I did not upgrade KDE.

I happened to know a bit about TLP because of this laptop, as I was visiting the Lenovo support forum for GNU/Linux, and various Ubuntu/Fedora users were struggling with power management aspects (as was I to a lessor extent). Hence I researched power-profiles-daemon and TLP and other themal/power apps. As it turned out, I stayed with TLP as installed by LEAP-15.3 and instead tweaked the Lenovo BIOS to work better with LEAP-15.3 with a more cutting edge 5.14.11 kernel.

If it had not been for my having the new Lenovo X1C9 (and having done some research for it) I would not have been able to talk about your question.

As for Tumbleweed, given I rarely use it, I can’t answer that - - possibly someone who knows more than myself could chime in.

6

I think power-profiles-daemon has been available for Tumbleweed for a while already? It’s now included in the recommended package alongside with TLP. I just removed and tabooed TLP, and only use power-profiles-daemon, since it’s a less hacky way of managing battery power. So far it has served me great!

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Although I am running Tumbleweed and not 15.3, still asking here as the topic is up. Have the latest Tumbleweed with power-profiles running (disengaged TLP as power-profiles stops it from running along with it).


[FONT=monospace]**835G8Nix:/home/vg #** systemctl status power-profiles-daemon.service  
**●** power-profiles-daemon.service - Power Profiles daemon 
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/power-profiles-daemon.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled) 
     Active: **active (running)** since Sun 2022-04-03 15:28:40 MSK; 1min 14s ago 
   Main PID: 1052 (power-profiles-) 
      Tasks: 3 (limit: 4915) 
        CPU: 33ms 
     CGroup: /system.slice/power-profiles-daemon.service 
             └─1052 /usr/libexec/power-profiles-daemon 

Apr 03 15:28:40 VG-835G8Nix systemd[1]: Starting Power Profiles daemon... 
Apr 03 15:28:40 VG-835G8Nix systemd[1]: Started Power Profiles daemon.

It is giving me good results, perhaps as good as did TLP in past years, through it seems power-profiles was installed by default when I installed Tumbleweed on my then recently bought EliteBook 835 G8 based on 5850U ryzen.

The question is that somehow I am missing the option for selecting Power Profiles under Battery and Brightenss applet, like shown in https://pointieststick.com/2021/07/23/this-week-in-kde-power-profiles-and-a-more-polished-kickoff/.

Am I missing something; running latest available Plasma 5.24.x and latest 5.17.x kernel. BTW, also as of 5.17 switched to running AMD P-State driver, instead of cpufreq.


[FONT=monospace]**835G8Nix:/home/vg #** cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_driver    
amd-pstate 
**835G8Nix:/home/vg #** cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor  
schedutil

Thanks.

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