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.

Linux does not consume power!

[anss123 (985305)]

The hardware that runs it does! Typical Intel, trying to shift the blame.

:)

Re:

[Syberghost (10557)]

Yes, but if we outlaw the manufacture, possession, or sale of hardware, then Linux won't be able to get any, and the tragedy of wasted power will end! Think of the children!

PowerTOP not for casual users

[zborro (591127)]

Of course this utility is very useful for developers and for Linux distributors.
For the average user it is a nightmare.

Re:

[vux984 (928602)]

Despite the humour/sarcasm in your post... i think in some cases the developer/vender should clearly indicate that it will cost additional money in electricity to run. And it should be -clear- not hidden in some EULA.

Projects like "folding@home" for PS3 which can add $200-400 a year to your electric bill.

Consumers should be made aware of that, before donating their 'free computing time'. Its not free.

Re:

[Dancindan84 (1056246)]

My fridge did not clearly indicate that keeping my food cold would cost me money in electricity. The hid that fact away in the "manual." I'm outraged.</sarcasm>

If people aren't aware that making an electronic device do work uses more electricity, it's their issue. I, for one, am tired of people putting the blame on others for not knowing the blatantly obvious.

$200-400 per year?!?

[benhocking (724439)]

I'm a little skeptical about that value (but willing to be convinced). I only pay about $300/year for electricity overall. Of course, I don't own a PS3. However, I do have a refrigerator and an air conditioner (as well as other devices that use electricity).

Re:

[imsabbel (611519)]

Well, a 24/7 PS3 (or folding@home high end computer) can take as much energy than all the rest combined, _if_ you dont use AC and dont heat electrically.

Quick caluclation: PS3= ca 200W. 2.5 kWh/day, ca 850 kWh/ year. con be everything from 50-300$, depending on your local energy costs.

Yeah, that'd pretty much double it for me

[benhocking (724439)]

Even though I do use AC (although sparingly). My heat comes from the radiators, and hot water comes from our apartment complex. (I.e., it's included in the rent.) Also, my stove/oven uses gas. Just throwing all of that out there since I seem to have generated a little bit of skepticism with my original claims.

Would anyone not notice (other than rich people with mansions, etc.) an increase of 2.5 kWh/day? Even if you use 10x the electricity that I do, that'd be a 10% increase.

Re:

[vux984 (928602)]

I've posted this before on slashdot but here's a quick breakdown:

The PS3 is reported to run 220W when running folding@home.

In, for example, New York, the average residential cost of power in 2006 was 16.86 cents: (http://www.ppinys.org/reports/jtf/electricprices. html)

So 220W or 0.22kW x .1686 $/kWh x 24h/day x 365days/year is: $324.93 per year.

New York is on the high side for the US, but not remotely the highest. And prices in Europe tend to be considerably higher.
Additionally, the rate tends tend to be ti

Wow, convincing numbers

[benhocking (724439)]

Based off your 220W figure, that results in approximately 158.4 kWh per billing cycle. Yowsa. folding@home would appear to be a good cause, but I agree that it would be nice to know up front how much you're actually "donating" to them. OTOH, if you don't notice an extra 158 kWh on your power bill, then perhaps you're not really going to care that much.

Re:

[vux984 (928602)]

folding@home would appear to be a good cause

I think it is.

but I agree that it would be nice to know up front how much you're actually "donating" to them.

That's the crux of it. $200-400 is not a trivial amount of money. And personally, even though I think folding@home is a good cause I think if I'm going to 'donate' that much money, I can think of other causes I think are more worthy... and I'll get a tax receipt too.

OTOH, if you don't notice an extra 158 kWh on your power bill, then perhaps you're not reall

Dominion Virginia Power

[benhocking (724439)]

My last 6 power bills add up to $127.10. Of course, that doesn't include the hottest months. I can't view back further than 6 months, or otherwise I'd provide a more exact number. I do know that my power bills don't go up that much during the summer, so I just guesstimated at the $300 value. No doubt it helps that I live in a 1-bedroom apartment and not a house.

It's not a bug, it's a feature (tm) !

[DrYak (748999)]

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.

Second screen shot uses more power

[jm91509 (161085)]

The blurb says that the tool told him to disable beagled which he did and he was duely impressed when the number of wake ups per second dropped. However the actual watts used went up. Thought the point was to save power?

Re:

[vidarh (309115)]

You're assuming that nothing else at all changed on the system to add to power consumption. Such as activity (both CPU and disk) when he shut down Beagle for example.

Laptops??? What about my server farm?

[mpapet (761907)]

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.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

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.

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.

How about hours?

[eddy (18759)]

Success Stories [linuxpowertop.org]

"With PowerTOP, I managed to increase the battery life of my Panasonic R4 laptop from 4 to almost 7 hours" -- Keith Packard, Principal Engineer at Intel

Guess you could accuse him of bias...

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Almost 3 hours, huh? That's pretty good! I wonder how much of this stuff is common sense, though. For example, killing beagled is pretty obvious because of what it does -- it constantly indexes stuff in the background, consuming power through HDD and CPU cycles.

Re:

[eddy (18759)]

If you just read the site (it's very small) you'll see that there are many no-obvious [mozilla.org] things you can detect with it. I personally do however consider it primarily a developer tool, but that might change. But even non-coding users can find out that the CDROM automounting polling is waking the CPU a lot, and disable that in battery mode, etc.

Re:

[caseih (160668)]

Kieth was well-known in the Linux world before he went to work for Intel. He's largely responsible for the composite X extension, and even the Xorg fork. I also believe he had some influence on the technology responsible for making compiz work. I remember using an early version of his experimental, fancy rendering X server. Also, notably, he created the kdrive mini x server for embedded environments. So he's got a lot of low-level linux experience.

Getting 7 hours of battery life is indeed impressive.

Re:

[jandrese (485)]

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.

Re:

[diegocgteleline.es (653730)]

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 e

Re:

[mpapet (761907)]

if you've a process eating 100% of the cpu power all the time

1. It's not so much acpi, but cpu frequency scaling I should have mentioned. Sorry, wrong terminology.

2. My point is that the unsexy work of sophisticated uses of frequency scaling would probably help more on a laptop. I'm estimating the most power consumption is the lcd panel followed by the cpu which is where the frequency scaling helps.

3. I run a bunch of servers and a storage array and it would be great if the disks would run at lower power

Re:

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

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.

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 genera

Re:

[Spoke (6112)]

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.

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

Awesome power saving. Read the article!

[euxneks (516538)]

From TFA:
 

In the screenshot, the laptop isn't doing very well. Most of the time the processor is in C2, and then only for an average of 4.4 milliseconds at a time. If the laptop spent most of its time in C4 for at least 20 milliseconds, the battery life would have been approximately one hour longer.

Wow. That's really cool. I love how open source allows you to tweak your settings down to the core like this - and Intel is the company that made it.

My results

[rg3 (858575)]

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.

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. :P

arts patch

[IceFox (18179)]

A KDE developer used it and made a patch for arts on his blog [homelinux.org]. I look forward to what other developers find and fix.

Just waiting to see...

[Gibbs-Duhem (1058152)]

gnome-power-manager as the biggest power hog on the system.

According to this utility ...

[PPH (736903)]

... its a tie between my USB-powered arc welder and all the kewl blue LEDs.

Re:

[h4rr4r (612664)]

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.

Re:Old Kernels

[VON-MAN (621853)]

Most people i know still run 2.4.x

On a laptop? Sorry, that's stupid.

Re:

[massysett (910130)]

On a laptop, it would not only be stupid, but lots of hardware wouldn't even work. Many laptops have the Intel ipw series wifi radios; these have drivers only for 2.6 kernels. I can't imagine anyone is running a recent laptop with a 2.4 kernel.

Re:

[jedidiah (1196)]

Utter nonsense.

All I've had to do on the last 4 laptops I've tried was to just run the Ubuntu installer/livecd.

Try running a distro that's not from the dark ages. Even Debian seems to fit this description.

Re:

[tayhimself (791184)]

This is not really true. There are still widespread problems for laptop users especially for older laptops that had ACPI quirks. Linux and the laptop vendors never really got ACPI straight for a few years. Also, lets not forget about all the function keys that are not always well supported (though my toshiba portege is fantastic except for ACPI being rubbish which i suspect is the vendors fault). Oh and I have used 2.4 and subsequently 2.6 kernels on it starting around 2004.

Re:

[lakeland (218447)]

I also disagree with you, I think you missed another requirement. Not dark ages, and not brand spanking new either.

For instance, I bought a machine based on the nvidia 6150 embedded graphics card. It was an absolute nightmare with incomatible, buggy ACPI, the network only worked after a warm boot, sound was horribly distorted with a background whine and sleep only worked once.

That nightmare lasted about three months. By then the kernel developers (with not even a bug report from me) had fixed absolutely

Re:

[Penguinisto (415985)]

I can live with running 2.4 on a server (*cough* thanks, Symantec... you (and that no 2.6-kernel-using NetBackup Server) suck! *cough*)

BUT - on a desktop, or laptop? Nuh-uh. I'm kinda greedy about functionality and performance in those cases.

/P

Re:

[Ryan Amos (16972)]

Um, what? I run NetBackup Server (version 6) on RHEL 4 (kernel 2.6.9) just fine. I have NBU clients running on RHEL 5 (kernel 2.6.18.) You just need compat-libstdc++-296 and compat-libstdc++-33 installed. It even tells you that in the manual.

No idea if earlier versions of NBU work on 2.6, but v6 is old enough now that it can be considered stable.

Re:

[Penguinisto (415985)]

Yep - should've been a bit more clear: I'm stuck with 5.1 here, and a corporate policy that demands that particular product for the time being. I'm pushing through paperwork and policy requests that will eventually let me use Bacula, but that's going to take awhile, unfortunately.

/P

Re:Old Kernels

[diegocgteleline.es (653730)]

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?

Re:

[dubbreak (623656)]

Most people i know still run 2.4.x

That's like me saying, "Most people I know run OS/2 and BeOS, so this doesn't help."

Sure it could be true, but so what? I just have a skewed sample and it just means I hang out with weirdos (well.. I do but they don't run OS/2 or BeOS, well.. they don't currently run them).

Re:

[VON-MAN (621853)]

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.

Re:

[eddy (18759)]

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."

Re:

[VON-MAN (621853)]

Now that IS serious. Have you read anything that would suggest such problems exists, or is this simply the most terrible thing you could think of?

Re:

[VON-MAN (621853)]

Never panic. Especially not around computers.

The real testing being when this hits distros. I'll probably try it later, maybe even wait for .22

You said it's your home fileserver that you wanted to try it with, so i wouldn't expect disasters on your metal. But of course, if you want to be absolutely sure there let the masses test this and use it later.

I don't mind a bit of excitement, now and then.

Re:How stable is CONFIG_NO_HZ?

[Ant P. (974313)]

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.

Re:Useless

[Andy Dodd (701)]

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).

Re:

[also-rr (980579)]

There are some really bad applications out there - one of the worst is superkaramba because it's easy to load the CPU heavily if you don't manage the timers properly.

A couple of very small changes to themes [revis.co.uk] can cut CPU use from 30% to 1% (with pic).

Based on that kind of thing it wouldn't surprise me if real gains were possible in battery life - at the very least for applications with user generated modifications and plugins. The more unpopular Firefox plugins are certainly notorious for lack of QA.

Re:

[Paradigm_Complex (968558)]

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.