System Settings -> Advanced Power Settings - Charge Limit is not persisting after machine is shut down

Support
1

My laptop sits on a desk 80% of the time, so fully charging the battery is a Bad Idea TM. I can set the charge limit to 90%, which works, but when I shut the machine down at the end of my work day the setting seems to get lost: when I start it up the next day the Charge Limit is back to 100%.

It’s a clean Manjaro install from a week ago, with ‘pamac update -a’ having been run today.

Any suggestions of what I can investigate to solve this?

System:
  Host: N/A Kernel: 5.18.10-1-MANJARO arch: x86_64 bits: 64
    Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 5.24.6 Distro: Manjaro Linux
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: ROG Strix G513QY_G513QY v: 1.0
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: ASUSTeK model: G513QY v: 1.0 serial: <superuser required>
    UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: G513QY.318 date: 03/29/2022
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 90.5 Wh (99.0%) condition: 91.4/90.0 Wh (101.5%)
CPU:
  Info: 8-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with Radeon Graphics [MT MCP] speed (MHz):
    avg: 1251 min/max: 1200/4889
Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD Navi 22 [Radeon RX 6700/6700 XT/6750 XT / 6800M]
    driver: amdgpu v: kernel
  Device-2: AMD Cezanne driver: amdgpu v: kernel
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.3 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.2 driver: X:
    loaded: amdgpu unloaded: modesetting,radeon gpu: amdgpu
    resolution: 1920x1080~300Hz
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD RENOIR (LLVM 14.0.6 DRM 3.46 5.18.10-1-MANJARO)
    v: 4.6 Mesa 22.1.3
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
    driver: r8169
  Device-2: MEDIATEK MT7921 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter
    driver: mt7921e
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 476.94 GiB used: 114.31 GiB (24.0%)
Info:
  Processes: 365 Uptime: 43m Memory: 15.04 GiB used: 2.79 GiB (18.5%)
  Shell: Zsh inxi: 3.3.19
2

I am using Manjaro KDE and face the same issue every time after shutdown. using a system service route to set the charging limit.

3

Check your Settings > Desktop Session and best is to enable Start with an empty session

4

No, it’s set to “Restore manually saved session” which is the default as far as I can tell.

5

Hang on, are you saying I should change from the default to “Start with an empty session”?

6

I am not sure what you mean.

Are you saying there is a config file I can edit? Run a script on boot?

But what’s the point of implementing a GUI that doesn’t work? What if this is meant to work and it’s not because of a bug? Shouldn’t I report it somewhere so it gets fixed?

7

I’m saying to switch to Start with an empty session and make sure the Power Settings are surviving reboot, and then switch back to whatever you prefer: Restore manually saved session or the other one.

Unless you expect perfection, but a saved session to work after reboot, has to be a session that is clean, because you might still boot into the session prior of making the changes in Power Settings …

8

I followed @anon89812132 's instructions and the settings still weren’t retained.

Please note who I was replying to. When I asked “But what’s the point of implementing a GUI that doesn’t work?” it was in response to @ajaychat3 's post, who said: “I am using Manjaro KDE and face the same issue every time after shutdown. using a system service route to set the charging limit.”

So, what do I do next? The setting isn’t getting retained. What can I do to investigate this? Should I report it somewhere? Where do I report an issue like this? Is this a problem with the KDE settings interface and should I report it to KDE? Is there a way for me to confirm it’s a problem with the KDE settings and not a problem with the Manjaro specific implementation of those settings? I have looked on other laptops I have access to that run Manjaro and they don’t even have the option to set a charge limit, so I haven’t been able to compare between machines. From what @ajaychat3 said it seems pretty clear that the GUI setting isn’t getting retained in his case, either.

Is there a workaround while I wait for this to get fixed upstream? @ajaychat3 seemed to indicate that it can be fixed by editing some settings file somewhere directly, but didn’t say what specific setting in what file.

9

Then we can move on to the next stage of the investigation.

We didn’t concluded yet if is a local issue for you and @ajaychat3 - and while there are multiple ways around this, the classic approach might be better.
Are the files ~/.config/powerdevilrc and ~/.config/powermanagementprofilesrc writable on your user, do your user owns those files?

10

@outsidefactor . Here is what I have done. I have a Asus laptop and the approach which I have adopted is given below. Hope it helps you as well.

  1. Create a service file named battery_charge_threshold.service like this.
[Unit]
Description=Set the battery charge threshold
After=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c 'echo 80 > /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold'

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
  1. Move the file to this location /etc/systemd/system
  2. Run the following commands.
sudo chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/battery-charge-threshold.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable battery-charge-threshold.service

After doing this, charge threshold of 80% (as per service file) will persist between reboots. It will also stop charging the battery if the current level is above 80%. Hope this helps. I have been using it for almost 1.5 years without any issue.

1 Like
11

The ~/.config folder is owned by my user and I have read and write to the directory. The file “powerdevilrc” doesn’t exist. “powermanagementprofilesrc” exists, and I have both read and write permissions. I checked, and powerdevil is installed.

These settings seem to be tied to a specific user and (in my limited understanding) only get loaded on user login, but surely “Charge Limit” is a system wide setting? For example, let’s say I have been on site, return to my office and dump my laptop on my desk to charge but I don’t log in, wouldn’t I still want to limit he charge to 90%, even without a user being logged on?

12

Thankyou for posting your workaround!

I will hold off putting it into action for a bit so I can continue to work with @anon89812132 on getting the GUI working, but thanks for letting me know your (quite elegant, if I may say) fix.

13

Apparently there is a bug report on this, but seems to be specific to some laptop models, and in the case of the OP of that issue report, it happens after booting to Windows …

The proposal is to go here Laptop/ASUS - ArchWiki and since your laptop is an ASUS, for sure will help.
More or less goes the same route as @ajaychat3 proposed, plus gives also a fix to persist from hibernate.

14

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