Automatic power management using powertop2tuned

Jonas Hubeny (jonashub), original: Daimar Stein Version unspecified Last review: 2026-04-03
Powertop2tuned is a command-line utility used in Linux to create custom tuned power-saving profiles based on recommendations generated by PowerTOP. It identifies “tunables” that may reduce power consumption, powertop2tuned generates a TuneD profile from those tunables, and TuneD applies them automatically when the profile is active.

Generate Profile

Install required packages

$ sudo dnf install powertop tuned-utils

or

$ rpm-ostree install powertop tuned-utils

If using rpm-ostree, reboot the system after installation before continuing.

Generate profiles

By default it creates the profile in the /etc/tuned directory based on the currently selected tuned profile.

I recommend to run the following command three times, once for the balanced profile (while plugged to the AC), once for the powersaver profile and once again for the balanced profile (while on battery, for the laptop users)

$ powertop2tuned profile_name --enable

For example we created: balanced_powertop, balanced-battery_powertop, powersave_powertop

Editing profile names

After that, just change the name of the profiles to the ones you created in /etc/tuned/ppd.conf.

Before the changes the file should look like this:

[main]
# The default PPD profile
default=balanced
battery_detection=true
sysfs_acpi_monitor=true

[profiles]
# PPD = TuneD
power-saver=powersave
balanced=balanced
performance=throughput-performance

[battery]
# PPD = TuneD
balanced=balanced-battery

After the changes:

[main]
# The default PPD profile
default=balanced
battery_detection=true
sysfs_acpi_monitor=true

[profiles]
# PPD = TuneD
power-saver=powersave_powertop
balanced=balanced_powertop
performance=throughput-performance

[battery]
# PPD = TuneD
balanced=balanced-battery_powertop

Enable the generated profile

After generating a tuned profile with powertop2tuned, enable it using tuned-adm.

List available profiles

$ tuned-adm list

Switch to your generated profile

$ sudo tuned-adm profile balanced_powertop

Verify which profile is currently active

$ tuned-adm active

After switching to your new profile, restart the tuned-ppd service to ensure all tools recognize the change:

$ sudo systemctl restart tuned-ppd.service

Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›