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<h1 id="improving-laptop-battery-performance-on-openbsd">Improving Laptop Battery Performance on OpenBSD</h1>
<p>2023-06-13</p>
<p>It is no secret that OpenBSD has poor battery performance on laptops. Although not as impressive as something like Alpine Linux or FreeBSD, you can tweak OpenBSD <em>just enough</em> to squeeze more life out of your machine&#8217;s battery.</p>
<h2 id="our-new-best-friend-">Our New Best Friend: <code>ampd</code></h2>
<p>I won&#8217;t go into great detail about <code>ampd</code> here - that&#8217;s what the incredible <a href="https://man.openbsd.org/apmd">documentation is for</a>. You&#8217;ll want to make sure to start it before trying to configure it:</p>
<pre><code>doas rcctl start apmd
</code></pre>
<p>If already running in a live session, you can default to <code>-A</code> (auto) but I suggest setting cpu performance to low:</p>
<pre><code>apm -L
</code></pre>
<p>To make these changes permanent on boot:</p>
<pre><code>doas rcctl set apmd flags -L
</code></pre>
<p>Optimizating battery life via <code>ampd</code> will have the most noticable impact but you can improve things even further by implementing some extra &#8220;small&#8221; performance wins.</p>
<h2 id="small-performance-wins">Small Performance Wins</h2>
<ol>
<li>Reduce your screen&#8217;s brightness (<code>xbacklight -set 50</code>)</li>
<li>Use a lightweight window manager instead of a beefer desktop environment</li>
<li>Enable battery saving options in your system BIOS (if available)</li>
<li>Disable the fingerprint scanner and bluetooth in your system BIOS (if available)</li>
<li>Use utilities such as <code>mpv</code> and <code>ffmpeg</code> for media consumption</li>
<li>Reduce the number of open applications at any given time</li>
</ol>
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