How to use Powertop to reduce power consumption

Update: Using rc.local is not the good way to do thing and may not work at all. Use the recommendations from the Power saving page on the Arch Wiki instead.

Powertop 2.0 is out (Release Announcement, The H Open article).

So how do I use it ? Well, I found the html report to be the most useful as it gives you the exact commands (Tunables) you need to run to adjust power settings:

$ sudo powertop --html

You will then find those commands in the Tunables tab in the powertop-*.html generated file. You should try carefully each one of them one by one as they can have some nasty effect (disabling USB mouse, increasing power consumption…).

If you’re using systemd like I do, and want to use the classic /etc/rc.local file to set those settings at boot time, you should use the initscripts-systemd package and make sure it is enabled with :

$ sudo systemctl enable rc-local.service