Missing power profiles

elusian

I think I made a bit of a mess of the power profiles in my laptop.

One month ago I installed tlp, despite needing only the setting for the battery limit. With it came linux-tools-x86_energy_perf_policy as a dep.
It complained about the power profiles daemon, but since I set it up to ignore any setting save for the battery, it seemed fine.
Indeed, power profiles kept working, and I could switch between them.

Since the last sync, I noticed that my laptop was set to performance mode at every boot, and even when switching I could not see a large difference performance/power usage/temperature (unlike before).
Suspecting tlp (which was updated this week) I decided to remove it (since I was not using it much), along with the dependency.

Now, however, the power profile settings seems to be gone.
They are neither in the Budgie applet, nor in the power section of budgie-control-center.

power-profiles-daemon, however, seems to be installed.

What else is needed to have the settings available?
I think I remember having a systemd unit for the power profiles, but I'm not very confident about that memory and I cannot find it now.

Thank you in advance

sHAKaJaada

Since TLP and saving battery power at a certain % level while the laptop is connected to the charger are an inevitable and must-have option for me, and after the latest updates power-profiles-daemon conflicts with TLP, i decided to uninstall it despite the fact that i use various applets that are related to power-profiles-daemon.
I found a temporary workaround by uninstalling the daemon itself without uninstalling Budgie desktop when removing it,
sudo eopkg --ignore-dependency rm power-profiles-daemon
continuing to use the more useful TLP for me.

elusian

As of this morning the issue I had with power-profiles-daemon was fixed by reinstalling (which probably should have been the first option but I don't like messing with the system mid-week)

sHAKaJaada
You chose to keep tlp instead, do you have something to emulate the power profiles anyway?
The default without power profiles active seemed to be performance and the cpu was getting fairly hot

sHAKaJaada

elusian I use TLP mostly just to keep the battery at a constant 80% while I'm using my laptop and it's always plugged in. I don't do any demanding processes that often so I don't have an overheating problem.

TraceyC

What Desktop Environment are you using? We always need to know this for support.

elusian

TraceyC
It's Budgie.

The issue has mostly been solved by reinstalling the power profiles daemon and then manually enabling the service in systemd.
I'm not sure why it was permanently disabled .

What I think happened is that tlp 1.9 has a reimplementation of PPD but since I was overriding the tlp config (to set the battery limit) it was horribly misconfigured. It starting in performance mode is also compatible with what tlp claims to be doing by default.

I guess it boils down to the fact that the two packages should not be installed together as they provide the same interface, but eopkg afaik does not have a way to deal with that (and one is in fact a budgie dependency)

I might retry to install tlp when I have more time to tune it's profiles to match the original PPD

TraceyC

Glad to hear you've got things sorted. It's definitely worth paying close attention to warnings like tlp was giving you. If you run into a situation like that again, the warnings might help us tweak the package in such a way to prevent packages from messing with DE dependencies.

elusian

The warning was

Warning: PLATFORM_PROFILE_ON_AC/BAT is not set because power-profiles-daemon is running.

which I ignored it because I never set those parameters.
Apparently, however, in tlp 1.9 the incompatibility got worse.

TraceyC

Thanks, that's helpful. I did a little digging and gotten some more details. I opened a packaging report about this, which you can subscribe to if you'd like updates. It does look like we can do at least something from the packaging side about this.

Thanks, everyone, who chimed in.