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Intel's PowerTOP Extends Linux Battery Life
DuracellFan writes "Intel recently released its PowerTOP utility, which builds on work done by kernel developers to make the Linux kernel power-efficient. PowerTOP gives a snapshot of what apps are consuming the most power. The PowerTOP website also hosts patches for several Linux apps and the kernel. In the Linux.com article, lead PowerTOP developer Arjan van de Ven of Intel says that PowerTOP could soon show which applications keep the disk busy." Linux.com and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.
The hardware that runs it does! Typical Intel, trying to shift the blame.
:)
Of course this utility is very useful for developers and for Linux distributors.
For the average user it is a nightmare.
No wonder people say Linux has bad driver support. This is like running windows98 today and claiming that modern devices have no drivers.
Even RHEL and Debian stable, which make up a huge chunk of enterprise server linux in the USA use 2.6 kernels.
Doesn't really matter. You can make yourself a custom kernel just to check your apps and services with NO_HZ. Then when you've identified the misbehaving processes you can fix them and start using your old kernel again.
DEAR User,
Sorry but you're mistaken.
You actually discovered our latest feature.
You haven't read about it yet, because we were developing and testing it until very recently, and we didn't want to speak to early about it.
We, as developers conscious of their travelling users, that have so much time that they need to work as they are in the train, have though of YOU !
As such we present you our latest feature :
WE GIVE YOU THE POSSIBILITY TO COOK YOUR DINNER ON YOUR LAPTOP (so you can do even more important things during the time you're commuting, which will leave you more free time when you reach your destination !)
Alternatively, you can also use our application on your laptop as AN INCREDIBLE AND COMPACT LAP-WARMER !!! For all those long commute during winter.
(DISCLAIMER : Warning, do not use with Batteries manufactured by Sony).
Thank you, wish you enjoy our brand new features.
- The Dev team.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
C'mon what are we talking about here, a few minutes? AFAIK, better power savings comes through a good acpi config, which I don't see a whole lot of discussion on.
My guess is where this kind of thing would make a dollars/cents difference is in the NOC. But this kind of detail isn't very sexy or very high on most NOC operators radar.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Sure, but I was thinking more like "I went with NO_HZ and then apparently the initialization code for my controller freaked out and ate my RAID-set" type problems, not "The SSH daemon didn't start."
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It could mean as much as an hour or two, depending. The less the CPU sleeps, the more power it consumes. The more the HDD gets accessed, the more power it consumes. ACPI doesn't buy you much if your CPU is constantly running at full clock and your HDD is always spinning.
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Guess you could accuse him of bias...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
That depends. Laptops are saving power because presumably they're idle most of the time and this program can tell you which processes behave badly while "idle" (by, say, polling the HDD for no good reason). On a server presumably your machine spends very little time idle (since you're serving stuff), so there isn't much opportunity for power savings from an application like this.
I read the internet for the articles.
Most people i know still run 2.4.x and Slackware still ships with 2.4 as default.
Slackware users don't know people. Stop lying! It's just yourself who runs 2.4, right?
C'mon what are we talking about here, a few minutes? AFAIK, better power savings comes through a good acpi config, which I don't see a whole lot of discussion on.
Do you even know what ACPI is? Have you read the link? (clearly not)
No matter how well your "acpi config" is done, if you've a process eating 100% of the cpu power all the time, your batteries will last less than a compuer with no ACPI that it's doing nothing.
IOW, even when your "acpi config" is good, you can save a lot of power. Not minutes, but even hours. How, is detailed in the article.
Wrong.
Can they fix the application? Yes. See the list of numerous patches to various "notorious" offenders.
Before you comment about patches being too difficult to apply - in nearly all cases those patches have been sent upstream and are being integrated into the app by the developers of that app. The end result is that while in the short term, PowerTOP benefits only power users who can patch and compile from source, it has enabled identification of offending sections of application code so that the application authors can fix it. (For example, the next release of Pidgin will come with numerous fixes for behavior found with PowerTOP.)
In short:
PowerTOP has almost no benefit for the "normal" user in the short term
PowerTOP has quite a lot of potential benefit for the "power" user
PowerTOP has the ability to enable application developers to make optimizations that help the "normal" users some time down the line (depending on application/distribution release cycles), thus PowerTOP has great benefit for "normal" users in the long term.
Can they stop the application? Usually not, but there are some notorious offenders that are "on by default" that most users don't benefit too much from, and would rather temporarily or permanently disable to increase battery life. (See Beagle for example).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Well if I find that turning off my music while working on a paper will give me another hour of battery time, it may well be worth it (particularly so if I don't have access to recharge). However, if I find it doesn't really eat that much power I'd like to keep rocking on. I don't ~need~ a lot of things as much as I need battery life in certain situations. I doubt I'm unique here.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
I have just tried the thing. I achieved less than 20 wakeups per second when my KDE desktop is idle, but learned a few things on the way. For example, by using a USB mouse instead of the laptop touchpad I am unable to reach state C3. It's reached when I unplug the mouse. I suppose I'll have to put up with it, because I can't stand the touchpad. On the other hand, I used to have KMail opened in a second virtual desktop to check for mail every 60 seconds, but I discovered that the bastard was waking up twice a second for no apparent reason, so I have started to use Korn (the mail check systray thingy). There are still some applications that wake up for no reason apparently. For example, why does klipper wake up once per second? And the same goes for kwrapper. I don't even know what that is. Can somebody explain in detail? Google isn't very specific about it.
:P
But yes, the application is very interesting. Sorry, Intel, my laptop has an AMD processor. The next one will be Intel, with an Intel graphics card and an Intel wireless card. I promise.
Our FreeBSD servers auto-throttle their CPU speeds down when idle. The average runtime on our monitored UPS has gone from 60 to 75 minutes. Even if electricity were free, and even if air conditioners were free, and even if we didn't care about wasting energy for no good reason, that still means we have 15 more minutes to get the generator up and running in the event of a long power outage.
Maybe that's not much to you, but it's pretty darn nice for us.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The biggest and easiest power savings come from CPU frequency scaling (if your processor supports it). Linux has long done a good pretty good job of putting the CPU to sleep and low power states when it can.
For older Athlon/Duron processors installing/running athcool makes a significant difference in power consumption (as long as it runs stable on your hardware, which it isn't guaranteed to do). On one of our old servers it reduced idle power draw from 100w to 65w.
It might depending on how idle your servers are. The more idle they are, the bigger the possibility for power savings. While they are obviously targeting laptop battery consumption, all Linux machines running this tool (and kernel 2.6.21 or later which has the dynticks feature) will be identify what is waking up their processor from low power states.
Much of the work put into optimizing battery life on laptops will also apply to desktops and servers alike.
A KDE developer used it and made a patch for arts on his blog. I look forward to what other developers find and fix.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
I'm using NO_HZ on my P4 desktop. It was horrible in old patches, but the version in the mainline kernel (>= .20) is solid as a rock.
I gave the powertop thing a try the other day. Seems the worst offender on my machine is MPD, even when it's not doing anything.
gnome-power-manager as the biggest power hog on the system.
... its a tie between my USB-powered arc welder and all the kewl blue LEDs.
Have gnu, will travel.