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⁠2.5.2. Provided Profiles

The following is a list of profiles which are installed with the base package:
balanced
The default power-saving profile. It is intended to be a comprimise between performance and power consumption. It tries to use auto-scaling and auto-tunning whenever possible. It has good results for most loads. The only drawback is the increased latency. In the current tuned release it enables the CPU, disk, audio and video plugins and activates the ondemand governor. The radeon_powersave is set to auto.
powersave
A profile for maximum power saving performance. It can throttle the performance in order to minimize the actual power consumption. In the current tuned release it enables USB autosuspend, WiFi power saving and ALPM power savings for SATA host adapters (refer to Section 3.8, “Aggressive Link Power Management”). It also schedules multi-core power savings for systems with a low wakeup rate and activates the ondemand governor. It enables AC97 audio power saving or, depending on your system, HDA-Intel power savings with a 10 seconds timeout. In case your system contains supported Radeon graphics card with enabled KMS it configures it to automatic power saving. On Asus Eee PCs a dynamic Super Hybrid Engine is enabled.

Note

The powersave profile may not always be the most efficient. Consider there is a defined amount of work that needs to be done, for example a video file that needs to be transcoded. Your machine can consume less energy if the transcoding is done on the full power, because the task will be finished quickly, the machine will start to idle and can automatically step-down to very efficient power save modes. On the other hand if you transcode the file with a throttled machine, the machine will consume less power during the transcoding, but the process will take longer and the overall consumed energy can be higher. That is why the balanced profile can be generally a better option.
throughput-performance
A server profile optimized for high throughput. It disables power savings mechanisms and enables sysctl settings that improve the throughput performance of the disk, network IO and switched to the deadline scheduler. CPU governor is set to performance.
latency-performance
A server profile optimized for low latency. It disables power savings mechanisms and enables sysctl settings that improve the latency. CPU governor is set to performance and the CPU is locked to the low C states (by PM QoS).
virtual-guest
A profile designed for virtual guests based on the enterprise-storage profile that, among other tasks, decreases virtual memory swappiness and increases disk readahead values. It does not disable disk barriers.
virtual-host
A profile designed for virtual hosts based on the enterprise-storage profile that, among other tasks, decreases virtual memory swappiness, increases disk readahead values and enables more aggresive writeback of dirty pages.
Additional predefined profiles are available by installing the tuned-profiles-compat package. These profiles are intended for backward compatibility and are no longer developed. The generalized profiles from the base package will mostly perform the same or better. If you do not have specific reason for using them, please prefer the above mentioned profiles from the base package. The compat profiles are following:
default
This has the lowest impact on power saving of the available profiles and only enables CPU and disk plugins of tuned.
desktop-powersave
A power-saving profile directed at desktop systems. Enables ALPM power saving for SATA host adapters (refer to Section 3.8, “Aggressive Link Power Management”) as well as the CPU, Ethernet, and disk plugins of tuned.
server-powersave
A power-saving profile directed at server systems. Enables ALPM powersaving for SATA host adapters and activates the CPU and disk plugins of tuned.
laptop-ac-powersave
A medium-impact power-saving profile directed at laptops running on AC. Enables ALPM powersaving for SATA host adapters, Wi-Fi power saving, as well as the CPU, Ethernet, and disk plugins of tuned.
laptop-battery-powersave
A high-impact power-saving profile directed at laptops running on battery. In the current tuned implementation it is an alias for the powersave profile.
spindown-disk
A power-saving profile for machines with classic HDDs to maximize spindown time. It disables the tuned power savings mechanism, disables USB autosuspend, disables Bluetooth, enables Wi-Fi power saving, disables logs syncing, increases disk write-back time, and lowers disk swappiness. All partitions are remounted with the noatime option.
enterprise-storage
A server profile directed at enterprise-class storage, maximizing I/O throughput. It activates the same settings as the throughput-performance profile, multiplies readahead settings, and disables barriers on non-root and non-boot partitions.
For more information on the Tuned profiles, refer to the tuned-adm(8) manual page.