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."

Snazzy effects

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[imbaczek]

Or is there a fundamental flaw in my logic that I'm missing here?

Yes, you are. Some parts are manufactured with power consumption being #1 priority and software is also getting smarter. (As TFA admits, at least theoretically :grin:>)

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[reset_button]

Some parts are manufactured with power consumption being #1 priority

Since all of the tests were run on the same hardware, power-efficient hardware is taken out of the equation.

Sig Fig nitpick

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

More features - Same power

[Cryophallion]

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.

too much crap

[m2943]

There are way too many daemons running on modern Linux systems; it really shouldn't require separate processes for I/O, settings, hardware configuration, every little panel thingy, etc.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly they only ran the experiment once with each setup, hence no estimate of the variance or error can be made. The results tell us nothing - without significance tests the article is, while interesting, nothing more than conjecture.

I'm shocked that slashdot has only rated the parent as "2, insightful". This point is at least as important as whether they used the same hardware for each test, which programs were used for the load test, and whether or not the writer was employed by Microsoft.

Shame on you moderators.

Re:Well duh!

[BlueParrot]

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.

Ubuntu certainly isn't windows. That is why you can open the package manager and purge most of the stuff that you find bloated, or use Xubuntu, which is designed to have lower requirements yet still be easy to use. Or if you REALLY want to streamline your system you could install a distro with that purpose, like DSL or Feather Linux. If that is too limited for your needs you could grab a minimal debian install and only install the packages you want.

My point? Different users have different needs. Ubuntu is explicitly targeted and those people who WANT an easy to use GUI and those people who WANT painless support for things they expect to just work. Making an operating system which caters to those users is the main purpose of the Ubuntu project. If your main priority is a streamlined system, then quite frankly you should be looking at something targeted at that rather than complaining about Ubuntu. Besides, it is not as if Ubuntu doesn't run just fine on moderate hardware. I'm using the Gutsy beta on a 5+ year old workstation my dad's job threw out because it was "old" as an example.

Re:Does Ubuntu benchmark this kind of thing?

[LingNoi]

I don't think Canonical does much in-house testing. I thought they got the community to do almost everything to do with Ubuntu, apart from employees who live around the globe and commit their code to the servers.

Re:No variance with one observation

[volsung]

One could roughly estimate the variance by looking at the meter fluctuations while taking the reading, or checking the design accuracy of the meter in the manufacturer's data sheet. You need some kind of estimate if you are going to draw any conclusions (which the authors of TFA were attempting to do).

Good but...

[suv4x4]

I really wish they put Ubuntu next to latest XP, latest Vista and latest OSX (ok I guess they could wait few days for Leopard to get out).

As an XP user, two Ubuntu tests don't give me a clear picture of how this relates to the OS I use right now. I do suspect Ubuntu will have lower power consumption than XP, and for Vista the margin will be pretty wide.

But how much exactly..?

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[noidentity]

Yeah, it's not the OS that's supposed to be using much of the new power; it's user applications. If anything, operating systems can reduce system usage by improving how they allocate system resources. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac OS X were more efficient than Mac OS 9 in some ways, due to having real multitasking and decent virtual memory (funny I'm typing this on my Mac OS 9 machine).

Problem: Too many useless processes

[arw]

The main problem with power consumption is a "We no longer care about CPU cycles" attitude among many programmers, especially among the KDE and Gnome crowd. Why is there a daemon for every little thing programs could formerly handle by themselves or through libraries?

Like gconfd for parsing configs and watching them for changes. Or dbus, as if there were no othere proven methods for IPC, that don't require another daemon idling around and waking up every other millisecond eating away battery life. Or just log out from a KDE session and watch those 10 or so beauties like dcopserver idling aroud, eating memory. And does anybody even know what something like bonobo-activation-daemon does?

The laziness of application programmers has gone much to far, instead of using methods that are provided by the operating system and just require finding them there is a load of new, redundant mechanisms mostly implemented by new daemons. Every programmer introducing some new battery-eater should be required to justify this additional power by more than just "its easier this way", "windows also has some registry-parsing daemon" or "but I don't like parsing sysfs myself".

NO_HZ is nice, but only curing the symptoms of a larger problem: daemon-bloat! Get rid of them and you will see some real improvements.

All of them.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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?

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.

Re:Is this supposed to be a surprise?

[rmerry72]

A new 3 GHz Athlon64 X2 requires 89W of power, whereas the old 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird used 74W.

So a new CPU is using 20% more power than the old one. Doesn't sound more power efficient to me. Better efficiency would involve the second number being lower than the first.

Sure but "it does more faster" I hear you say. That needs qualification. With the same battery I'll be able to use my laptop for 20% less time (say 2.5 hours instead of 3). If it does more faster, how come I get 30 minutes less time to use it before my battery craps out?

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. You need power consuption is only relevant over a period of time, so figures need to be in Kwh to be of any use. TFA stated tests last 15 min so all figures can be converted to Kwh. Your arguement doesn't.

Re:Snazzy effects

[Runefox]

I'd prefer a HW-accelerated interface to one that's more or less driven by the CPU. The flashy effects can be turned off if you don't like that, though some of them (desktop cube, "expose", and so on) actually provide some utility.

I'm still very disappointed in any OS that can't wobble its windows.

Boingy boingy. Amusing for idle time.

Re:Sig Fig nitpick

[volsung]

So that's one piece of the uncertainty on the measurement. The next piece we need is how much the power reading fluctuates while the computer is in a "steady" state. Using my Kill-A-Watt, I've seen short time variations of a few watts on a computer (though it drew more power than a laptop).

Re:too much crap

[A beautiful mind]

So what are the alternatives?

Either you bundle them in one horrid complex mess where maintainability gets inverse squared with any new feature, or you simply don't use the feature at all. With lots of separate daemons you have the option to axe those you don't want/need and the rest are benefiting from a modularized way of looking at things.

Re:DRM effects. Re:Snazzy effects

[PitaBred]

So... in [3], what Ou is saying is that even if Vista doesn't use more "power", it's still using 3x the CPU resources to do something that actively detracts from a consumer's options in using media? And this is somehow... good for the consumer, wasting resources without giving the owner of the machine a choice in the matter? Just because it doesn't use more power from 5-15% doesn't mean that the difference between 50% and 60% utilization won't change the wattage draw. I think y'all got something a little backwards, especially when you cherry-pick your tests.

Re:Kind of.

[Big Jojo]

So the next question is: How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them ,,,?

More like: Why hasn't the Ubuntu team turned off more of that crap by default?