Persistently disable wlan powersaving in NetworkManager

After each time I had rebooted my machine I would have to manually disable power management on my wireless network card. I was using iwconfig for this, but then it occured to me that it could probably be done automatically in NetworkManager itself.

When I’m not connected to a network

$ iwconfig wlp2s0
wlp2s0    IEEE 802.11  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on

Manually disable power management

# iwconfig wlp2s0 power off
$ iwconfig wlp2s0
wlp2s0    IEEE 802.11  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off

But instead of doing this manually; create a new drop-in configuration file in the NetworkManager conf.d/ folder:

#
# /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-powersaving.conf
#
[connection-wifi-wlp2s0]
wifi.powersave=off

Reboot to see if it works as it should. Otherwise get some clues with journalctl --boot to read the log of the current boot.

Expected output after reboot

$ iwconfig wlp2s0 | grep "Power Management"

References

• man NetworkManager
• man NetworkManager.conf
• man nm-settings