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Ubuntu's Power Consumption Tested

Posted by kdawson on from the no-lyme-disease dept.

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."

10 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Is this supposed to be a surprise? by cleatsupkeep · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise? by Cruicky · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It would have been nice if the article confirmed that the HPET timer was active, which I believe is rather important for the tickless kernel to work most efficiently.

  2. Other OSes? by p0tat03 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd be more interested in seeing how Ubuntu's power consumption stacks up against Windows and MacOS...

    1. Re:Other OSes? by tomee · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree. There also seems to be no info on whether they used the 3d-desktop stuff. I would imagine that that would have a much greater impact on the power consumption, and it would be interesting to see some data on that.

    2. Re:Other OSes? by Splab · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In my own experience running Ubuntu 7.04 gives me somewhere between 5,5 hours and 6 hours of battery time. Running windows XP usually gives me around 8 hours of battery time. I use both distributions for development, I code under MS VS (C++) in windows and use VIM under linux for development (also C++).

      Gonna check out the new 7.10 and see if I can get nearer to what windows can give me.

  3. Kind of. by khasim · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    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 ... but still uses more power than even earlier releases did.

    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?

  4. Well duh! by pair-a-noyd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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.

    1. Re:Well duh! by corychristison · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've got an older system here... I built it roughly 5 years ago (I think -- I may be over-estimating). It's an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB OEM RAM, 120GB SATA Hard drive, and an Nvidia FX 5200 video card (I think)...

      I used to run SuSE 9.1 and was running it fine for 3 years or so... then came time to try and upgrade to a newer version. Of course this is right around the time that Novell bought SUSE and changed it up a bit. So an easy upgrade was indeed not possible. I decided to try out a few distributions but had a lot of problems finding one that would work fast and I ended up on Gentoo. I know, I know, compile time was a pain in the ass... I decided to go down the XFCE route and use all of the lighter-weight GTK programs... I think I only have one QT program that I actually use installed and it only depends on QT, nothing else.

      Xubuntu ran O.K... but not anywhere near as nice as Gentoo is. I think it's not the fact that it was compiled and optimized... I beleive it's because during installation I learned more as I set it up. And I knew what I wanted/needed to run the system. Whereas Ubuntu makes a lot of choices for you, mostly in system services, etc. I have a total of 29 items that start up when I boot. I think only 10-15 of them are actually daemons. Right now I am using 215MB or so of my 1GB of RAM... this is with Firefox (4 tabs), Thunderbird w/Lightning, aMSN, Terminal, Mousepad and a whole slew of items on my panel.

      If you want lightweight, make sure you know exactly what is going on your system. And use something like XFCE or Fluxbox versus KDE or Gnome.

      Just my two cents. :-)

  5. I can believe that by MikeRT · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects by DAldredge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.