nixos-apple-silicon VS powertop

I just used this: https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon/blob/main/do...

I used one of their releases rather than building my own image. It’s a guide that merits careful reading, as some key steps are not specifically bulleted. Oh, and it’s not the NixOS graphical installer.

But it was dead simple, and 99% of the heavy lifting is from the Asahi team. The biggest downside is that updating the support files is a manual process, but NixOS of course makes it a breeze to rebuild into a new environment—and back out if it doesn’t work.

I doubt it will ever have native support. NixOS doesn't do native support. For what it's worth I'm running NixOS on an M2 Max MPB using https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon.

Most hardcore Nix users/developers I have met have been suspicious for Flakes for several years, so your point rings true.

That said, it feels like they are slowly coming to terms with it and just accepting it as default. Here are two examples of maintainers eventually accepting flake support on their repos after initial hesitation [1][2].

[1] https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon/pull/47

I do, no issues at all with the beta Asahi kernel, you basically have to git clone https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon in /etc/nixos/, include a file from that repo in the configuration.nix and configure as you like (beta gpu driver or not, which kernel, 4k pages or not, ecc). The experience then is exactly the same as a stock NixOS installation.

there is a NixOS iso for m1 you can use it https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon

powertop is just relaying whatever value my laptop's battery is reporting for consumption, read from sysfs[0]. Are you suggesting my laptop's battery is merely estimating current and/or voltage? I don't know much about the hardware in my laptop's battery, and I'm not succeeding in finding information online, but I'm going to need a source to believe that considering how trivial it would be for the battery to report real values for current and voltage.

[0] https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/blob/master/src/measure...

If you're certain your GPU has deeper power saving states than P8, I would start by checking why it's not using them. Maybe tlp, powertop or nvtop (or their documentation) can help.

The only Linux tool for this I've even heard of is powertop , which OP mentioned, but it looks nontrivial to build (kernel patches are mentioned).

It just got added in 2023, but there's now --auto-tune-dump which generates a command line invocation of powertop that would set all the auto-tune settings. Instead of running --auto-tune, you can make a script of this dump, modify it to your contentment, and run the script instead of auto-tune at startup.

Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain tunings from auto-tune as well, but

https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/pull/116

Would running auto-cpufreq and powertop be a better combination to avoid installing XFCE4 dependencies? I don't play a lot of games or do a ton of compiling, but when I need to, I would like to be able to get as much out of the hardware as I can.

Recommend looking for an open bug report here for the same issue, and if nobody else has opened one you can file one yourself to get support/get the issue fixed in a patch.

`powertop --auto-tune` can set some settings to "good", but it may in fact be counterproductive, e.g. setting USB to autosuspend that suspends a mouse that shouldn't be, etc. See here for more info. In my experience/research, it doesn't really do much.

For me it wasn't efficient by default. I use powertop and auto-cpufreq

It may be found at GitHub.