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."
I'm confused - don't computers now use more power then they used to? Because of new software and being able to do more powerful things?
I mean - Vista will use more power than Windows XP, OS X will use more power than Mac OS 9.
Or is there a fundamental flaw in my logic that I'm missing here?
I'd be more interested in seeing how Ubuntu's power consumption stacks up against Windows and MacOS...
Although each newer system does more ... they've also improved the code so that it does so more efficiently. Or in the case of the tick-less kernel, other code has changed.
... but still uses more power than even earlier releases did.
So, the question is: Do the improvements offset the additional features.
The answer is: Yes, to a degree. 7.10beta runs cooler and more efficiently than 7.04
So the next question is: How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them and how much of a power savings will you see then?
Does anyone know if Ubuntu actually have machines hooked up to measure this kind of thing in house, looking for regressions in power usage? I gather the OLPC project has thing kind of thing as part of their build system (driven off the code repository), but they are naturally particularly concerned about battery life.
"more daemons and processes running by default on these modern Ubuntu releases is actually causing an increase in power consumption."
Ya think?
I just install OpenSuse 10.3 on a tower type and a laptop.
The first thing I do is go in and disable a whole slew of bullshit that's enabled by default.
I LOVE Linux but the trend lately has been to BLOAT it up like a new eMachine that's preloaded with 40gigs of bullshit.
What ever happened to minimal? When I installed Suse 9.3 on my Athlon 64 w/1g ram, it ran like a cat with it's ass on fire.
SAME hardware with OpenSuse 10.2 was abysmal. It was sooooo bad that I was just about to give up on it then 10.3 came out.
It's a slight improvement but, damn! They are developing all the new distros with the assumption that everyone is going to run out and buy all new shit. Shades of M$, dare I say??
For the longest time Linux captured and held my heart because it would run so fast on the oldest, worst case hardware.
No more. Wanna run the latest distro? Better put some $$$ back for all new hardware...
Bloat = power drain.
How about getting back to basics and quit focusing on the bling-bling. Linux is NOT windows and it never should be. Quit trying to make it look and act like windows. Quit trying to make it run windows crap. Be happy that it's not windows. I do not want windows compatibility. At all. Ever.
Kill the bloat and pork and watch power consumption go down. Not to mention the old PC's being tossed out into the environment.
I was pretty amazed with the beta of Ubuntu 7.10. I even installed it on my system, but after about 30min-1 hour of use, trackerd was consistently keeping my CPU usage up at least 30%. That's not the fault of the Ubuntu team, as they did not write trackerd, but they really do need to be careful about the daemons that they allow to run in the background on a default installation. I don't know what it is there for, but according to this description, it doesn't sound like it is something that a vanilla, desktop installation would want on there. The approach to background processes should be the KISS. On a vanilla desktop installation, only the barest set of such thing should be on there.
Once beagle is disabled in opensuse the system runs much more smoothly
There must be something very wrong with tested system or Ubuntu configuration. 30 watts idle consumption is very, very wrong. My Thinkpad z61t idles at 13-14W with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. I expect lower value after upgrading to 7.10. And maybe even lower when I roll my own latest kernel with patches from lesswatts.org. I would be happy to go to 10W on idle, it would match advertised 6.25 hr worktime with 65Wh battery I have.
:wq
If it took you 5 hours to figure that out then you really do not need to be using a computer...
From Wikipedia Criticism of Peter Gutmann's analysis of Vista DRM Peter Gutmann's Vista criticism has come under fire after his speech at the USENIX Security Symposium in August 2007.[3] from George Ou (ZDNet) who challenged Peter Gutmann's claims that Vista Content Protection causes so much additional CPU utilization that it increases power consumption and causes global warming.[4] Gutmann made many of the basic assertions in his paper on Vista content protection but made the more extreme statements at Usenix Boston 2007 as reported by PCWorld.[3] Ou cited data that showed no measurable power differences between 5% and 15% CPU utilization on an Intel E6600 dual-core processor and then cited HD playback performance data from AnandTech which indicated less than 7% total CPU consumption during 1080p VC-1 encoded video playback.[5] Ed Bott challenged some of Peter Gutmann's other claims.[6] Ken Fisher challenged Gutmann's claim that Vista content protection extended beyond commercial content in to user generated content.[7] Gutmann admittedly doesn't run Windows Vista and stated in his paper: "Can others confirm this? I don't run Vista yet, but if this is true then it would seem to disconfirm Microsoft's claims that the content protection doesn't interfere with playback and is only active when premium content is present". This statement has recently been removed from Gutmann's website but an older PDF version the paper with that statement can be found here. George Ou later reported that Gutmann relied on web forum postings for several of his key assertions such as excessive CPU and memory consumption in Vista's Media Foundation Protected Pipeline (mfpmp.exe) and AudioDG (Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation) process. Ou's tests showed that the web forum data Gutmann relied on were not repeatable. Furthermore, CPU utilization was wrongly attributed to mfpmp.exe when in fact it was actually accounting for all the CPU consumption in mfpmp.exe and Windows Media Player 11 combined.
I have been through all Gutmanns material. At the time of writing the paper he had zero experience of Vista use, instead relying on comments made on websites and in forums to base his entire paper. The fact that he modified his paper 9 months later seems a little like bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, don't you?
As for the list of 'key quotes', Gutmann fails to address any of the points that Ou actually raised, instead claiming he was working from an outdated edition of his presentation. This is irrelevant as he well knows - he needs to address why he's uses blog postings from Karel Donk and others, as a basis to make horrendously inaccurate claims about the DRM technology. A large proportion of the claims he's made have been proven false by Ou and others, but Gutmann is more prepared to attack Ou's method of arguing his points than the actual points themselves.
I have no qualms about Gutmann arguing against DRM from a moral/ethical standpoint, if he so wishes. However, from a technical standpoint his points are almost totally baseless.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien