A new version of the Power Profiles Daemon (PPD) was uploaded to the Plucky archives today, and should soon make its way out to Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds —but what’s changed?
The power-profiles-daemon is what those of who run Ubuntu (or Linux Mint 22.1, which finally added PPD) interact with when we switch power mode on the fly, be it using a GUI button, setting, or toggle, or the command line.
The latest 0.30 release adds a couple of notable changes, though nothing as substantive (to end-users) as the various AMD-targeted tune-ups the previous release delivered.
Still, improvements are improvements. Some of the ones present in v0.30 could allow advanced users, distro builders, and canny community folks to exert more control over power demand to eke out more performance or more efficiency.
PPD v0.30 supports turning upower on or off at runtime. This will let desktop environments decide whether to allow actions and profiles to be adjusted dynamically based on events, such as hitting a certain battery level or a power adapter being connected.
New powerprofilesctl query-battery-aware and powerprofilesctl configure-battery-aware commands enable the status of this to be checked or configured respectively.
That support is built out of a broader change to support configuration actions as ‘enabled’ or ‘disabled’ through a new DBus API. The new API is said to be present on the modern interface only so systems with legacy approaches remain unaffected.
User preference for this gets saved into the PPD configuration file and used to configure PPD the next time it runs, e.g., ‘enable’ is the new ‘default’.
New powerprofilesctl list-actions and powerprofilesctl configure-action commands allow actions to be listed and configured, respectively.
Finally, PPD 0.30 boasts better compatibility with (the upcoming) Linux kernel 6.14.
Linux kernel 6.14 supports a new way to handle ACPI platform profiles, Multiple drivers can register at the same time but change settings independently. While the legacy interface still works, a new setting called custom helps ameliorate conflicts if profiles disagree.
PPD 0.30 updates itself to handle this new string —as the final stable release of Ubuntu 25.04 plans to come equipped with Linux kernel 6.14, this is a timely adjustment.