Tuned 2.28 Fixes Out-of-the-Box WiFi Power Saving on Fedora After Year-Long Bug

Red Hat has released Tuned 2.28, the latest version of its adaptive system tuning daemon for Linux. The tool is used by default on Fedora to monitor workloads and automatically adjust system settings for performance or power efficiency.

The most significant change in this release addresses a long-standing WiFi power-saving issue. Since last year, Tuned had a bug where it attempted to enable WiFi power saving via the iwpriv utility. However, Fedora no longer ships the iwpriv package, so the power-saving feature silently failed on out-of-the-box configurations. Users running default Fedora setups were not getting the expected battery life improvements from WiFi power management.

With Tuned 2.28, the WiFi power management handling has been switched to use the iw utility instead. The iw package is now a mandatory RPM build dependency for Tuned, ensuring that modern systems will actually apply power-saving settings for WiFi adapters. The iwpriv support is retained for legacy compatibility, but the new default path uses iw, which is available on current Fedora and most other distributions.

Another key change targets the network-latency profile. The AVC (Access Vector Cache) threshold has been increased from 512 to 8192. On RHEL 9 and RHEL 10, the default value of 512 was observed to cause latency spikes for network-intensive workloads. The new threshold should reduce these spikes and improve consistency for real-time and low-latency networking tasks.

Tuned 2.28 also brings several other improvements: better error messages with more context, additional build documentation, updated systemd integration, and more options for network interrupt coalescing.

The source code for Tuned 2.28 is available on GitHub. Users who compile from source or maintain custom builds can now integrate the new version. For Fedora users, the update is expected to arrive via the regular package repository in the coming days.