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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?
As cool as these Compiz effects are, they should not be forced upon everyone, just made very easy for people to obtain.
Plus, this version never actually booted up because it didn't like my Broadcom 4318.
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?
1. Run the particular distro.
2. Make sure the power cord is long and in the open.
3. Allow a penguin to chew through the cord.
4. Measure the distance the penguin flies after chewing into the cord. This will give you some idea of the power usage.
5. Well, don't let that penguin go to waste! BBQ and teriyaki are great ways to make penguin. Personally, I prefer General Tso's Penguin myself.
TFA doesn't specify error bars, which of course makes the results somewhat dubious. They list numbers to two decimal place accuracy (e.g. 48.00), but since all the numbers end in .00, I'm guessing those decimal places are not significant. In other words, the number are only good to within +/- 1 or +/- 2 or something like that. Considering that they are trying to compare numbers that are quite similar (27 to 33), their conclusions may not be reliable.
When comparing numbers, an estimate of the error is crucial. If the difference between two measurements is smaller than the error, then you cannot meaningfully say they are different.
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.
toast, still not free
-Reid
"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.
Actually, I think it is rather impressive that 7.10 (which has eye candy on by default) has slightly less power consumption than 7.04 (no eye candy by default).
In other words, they increased features while decreasing (generally) power consumption. While it seems to be only about 1 or 2 watts lower (excepting battery idle where it is slightly higher), we are only talking 3-5 watts difference over 2.5 years of updates. In fact, it went down 4 watts using ac idle compared to 5.04, which I am sure had far fewer daemons/features.
Some of this may be better code etc. However, I think we should be giving the people who have been doing the coding here major Kudos for doing getting the most out of our computers (whereas MS wants us to quadruple our ram to use eye candy, they are doing it with the same amount of ram standard 4 years ago on a desktop, and keeping power down). I don't even want to think of what Vista must use in power.
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 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.
Given that the stock Ubuntu (if you don't include "restricted drivers") comes with FULL source code, yes, all of them.
On a more realistic note, most people do need restricted drivers, and most people don't want to mess around with source code. But it's based on Debian, which means, for the most part, you can completely remove services you don't need, point and click, provided you know what they are.
Then again, I actually do want most of these services -- for example, the parts that make everything plug'n'play, from USB storage to wireless, even the CD "autorun" feature of Windows if you really want it. Most users won't have to think about "mounting" any more than they do on Windows, and somewhat more than they might on OS X, and that's a good thing.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.