Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu's Power Consumption Tested
RedDragon writes "Ubuntu 7.10 is due out on Thursday, October 18, and in addition to desktop 3D effects, GNOME 2.20, and other features is the use of the Linux 2.6.22 kernel with the tick-less (CONFIG_NO_HZ) kernel feature. But does this mean enhanced power savings when compared to past Ubuntu releases? Phoronix tested Ubuntu power consumption looking back 2-1/2 years at the six Ubuntu releases from Ubuntu 5.04 to the yet-to-be-released Ubuntu 7.10. Testing was done when the system was idling and then under load, and when the Lenovo notebook was powered via the battery and then again with the AC adapter. The Pentium M CPU temperature was also monitored. While Ubuntu 7.10 does include the tick-less kernel feature, more daemons and processes running by default on these modern Ubuntu releases is actually causing an increase in power consumption."
Rest assured, it takes you four mouse-clicks to disable them. Every tried that under Vista?
very misleading healine. I RTFA and if you look at the nice graph, it actually shows a decrease in power usage since feisty and just about what the prior versions were. AC power consumption idling went from 31 to 29 from feisty to gutsy. while loaded, it went down slightly from 51 [feisty] to 50 [gutsy] the only thing that gutsy was higher in was battery discharge rate idle- it was at 22.26 while feisty was at 21.16. while loaded on battery it went down from 33.51 to 32.21 from feisty to gutsy.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Vista takes 5.
1: Right click on desktop.
2: Select Personalize
3: Select Theme
4: Select Windows Classic
5: Click OK.
> What ever happened to minimal?
You would like to have a light Linux distribution? Something like this perhaps:
http://www.puppylinux.com/
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/about.htm
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Laptop users may want to stick with 32-bit Ubuntu, since the CONFIG_NO_HZ (tickless kernel) option isn't available in 64-bit kernels yet.
If you're feeling adventurous, patches here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/tglx/hrtimers/
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
Or http://www.fluxbuntu.org/
pair-a-noyd's rant is seriously misdirected. Linux is whatever you want it to be. That is one of the advantages of having several hundred active distros.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
By going to smaller transistors, lower voltages, and more clever power management schemes, they have managed to get more work done per watt than before. A new 3 GHz Athlon64 X2 requires 89W of power, whereas the old 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird used 74W.
Did you use Compiz in Gutsy but not in Feisty, then? A lot of people add Compiz to their Feisty installations, but it is default only from Gutsy, so I'm going to assume that's a "yes" in this post.
When activating Compiz on my laptop, I start to fear hearing problems, because the fans have to be at maximum speed non-stop (it's a Macbook, and I've been using it in my lap - any reproductive abilities are in other words long gone, so I don't have to fear that), while they are off at all times except when playing games or watching movies when I don't use it. The reason seems to be that the 3d accelerator on the GPU emits huge amounts of heat when being used. This is with intel graphics, which I've heard are relatively cool - I don't even want to think about what it would be like with ati or nvidia.
The solution? System -> Preferences -> Appearance, the tab Visual Effects, set to None. You may need to log out and back in. This gives you plain, old Metacity, with more and better window management abilities, but fewer bugs.
The HPET stuff is now scheduled for merge into the 2.6.24 kernel. I've had to patch my earlier kernels to get HPET, which as you say is really necessary for tickless to do its stuff. The article suggests that this is a stock Gutsy installation. But then again, most distros do a bit of custom patching of their kernels. In particular, Gentoo does not include the HPET patch.
So the question here: Does the Gutsy kernel have the HPET patch applied?
If not, then these power numbers are definitely pessimistic, presuming that they move to an HPET kernel (2.6.24+) as it's available.
Someone here with a Gutsy system should run "powertop" on it, and let us know. IIRC, powertop suggested that I use the HPET, and with a little digging I found that a patch was needed, and took care of it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
HPET is in the vanilla linux kernel since at least 2.6.21, because I had it working after a motherboard flash update. The patches you talk about is actually helping to enable HPET support for some chipsets, but are not mandatory for a working HPET support.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Does this answer your question?
/boot/config-2.6.22-14-generic
$ grep HPET
CONFIG_HPET=y
CONFIG_HPET_MMAP=y
# CONFIG_HPET_RTC_IRQ is not set
CONFIG_HPET_TIMER=y
CONFIG_HPET_EMULATE_RTC=y
$ dmesg | grep hpet
[ 8.328261] hpet0: at MMIO 0xfed00000, IRQs 2, 8, 0
[ 8.328266] hpet0: 3 64-bit timers, 14318180 Hz
[ 0.744000] Time: hpet clocksource has been installed.
Sorry to ruin your nit pick but a quick google search tells me that the SeaSonic PowerAngel used in the test has an accurazy of 2%.
So a 2% variance on 33 watts is between 32.33 and 33.66. The 27 would be between 26.46 and 27.54.
of course, this is approxamate I just got what 2% of 33 was and added/subtracted. It's the lazy mans math.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
There is an option to not index while on battery power. I know in earlier alphas that option didn't actually work, hopefully that is fixed by now.
So if you start your number crunching computer program and push "Start" and it takes 15 minutes on the first CPU and over 40 on the second, presuming you were to turn your computer off when the program finished, you'd have used the first one for less than half the time.Not really; most laptops and many desktops can scale their speed. If you want to accomplish 15 minutes of work in 40 minutes, you can either throttle the newer CPU's speed (presumably using much less than the full power rating) or replace it with an older processor which is not as efficient (and therefore equally as fast, but likely to use more power).
If you scaled your new one down to less than the speed of your old one, you'd get more time out of it. So if you're watching a DVD and not really accomplishing a lot of "work", that's what you'd do to get more time than the old laptop but still have more processing power.
Remember, 3GHz refers to CPU clock cycles per second - an old thunderbird gets less done in a cycle than a new Athlon64 X2. So even a 1.4GHz single core Athlon64 is faster than a 1.4GHz Thunderbird. So you can slow the new one down from 1.4GHz and still get the same work out of it. A DVD might be choppy at 500MHz on a really old machine, but a brand new state of the art processor might be able to deal with it just fine at 500MHz, even if both machines have similar bus and memory speeds and come with the same MPEG decoding video card.Actually, this is a characteristic of both transistors and vacuum tubes, and therefore literally all CPUs do this. The amount of voltage supplied to the CPU is supposed to be constant - but the more transistors you use, the more amperes are drawn (volts * amps = watts). Relative to peak power usage, the difference between two idle CPUs is likely negligible, even for older models.
Find a computer with a variable speed CPU fan, and listen for it to shut off when you're idling. Less heat means less power.
From Peter Gutmann's excellent "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection". This paper should be required reading for anyone considering purchasing a Vista PC for ANY use.
You do realize that a dual core Athlon64 is many times faster than an Athlon Thunderbird? You can easily underclock an Athlon 64 until it uses less than 74W, or grab the laptop version with much lower power consumption, and it would still outperform a T-bird. (I grabbed the first power measurements I could find and assumed people could do the scaling in their head.) Modern CPUs also do the power throttling you describe already.
On my Dell 1420N (2GHz Core 2 Duo on the Santa Rosa chipset) with an up-to-date Gutsy, a few minutes after logging in to GNOME powertop reports 190 wakeups from idle per second and a power usage of 12.6W. After following all of powertop's recommendations (including disabling bluetooth and reducing wifi power), wakeups and power usage went down to 58 and 11.4W respectively.
What would be better is a CPU that can use up to 89W when it needs it, then falls back to much lower - say 10W - when it idle and waiting for me to type a clever response into Slashdot.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool'n'Quiet It works by reducing the processor's clock rate and voltage when the processor is idle.. Before you bash someone else make sure you don't make yourself look like a jackass in the process.
First, I'll let Gutmann comment on his use of various OSes:
As far as George Ou and Ed Bott are concerned, again I'll let Gutmann himself address this. Key quotes below:
...
...
...
...
...
...
...