It is important to measure power consumption in operating system especially when you try to maximize the battery life of your laptop, or reduce the energy bill of rack-mounted servers in a data center. Power usage monitor can also be helpful to diagnose issues with power management, or even buggy behaviors of applications.
In this post, I will describe how to monitor power usage in Linux operating system.
For Linux-based systems, you can use PowerTop, an ncurses-based command-line tool developed by Intel to monitor process-level power consumption, and to provide suggestions to optimize power management. PowerTop supports Intel, AMD, ARM, and UltraSparc processors while it is the most reliable on Intel processors for the obvious reason.
To install PowerTop on Ubuntu or Debian:
To install PowerTop on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL:
To launch PowerTop, simply run:
Once PowerTop is launched, you can press left/right arrow keys to navigate tab-based UI. PowerTop can start reporting power estimates after it has collected enough measurements, which can take a couple of minutes. Previous measurements are stored in /var/cache/powertop, and will be loaded upon subsequent PowerTop launch.
In "Tunables" menu, you can experiment with various power management settings in case some tunable parameters are not enabled on your Linux distribution.
For offline analysis, PowerTop allows you to export power monitoring results to csv or html format as follows.
$ sudo powertop --html=output.html
To get more accurate estimates, you can run PowerTop in "calibration" mode as follows. The entire calibration process can take a couple of minutes. During calibration, PowerTop can disconnect your system from WiFi, adjust screen brightness, and generate USB device activities.
Loaded 27 prior measurements Starting PowerTOP power estimate calibration Calibrating idle Calibrating: disk usage My (0) time 14986258702 is not the same as child (0) time 15395089845 Calibrating backlight .... device /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness
The screenshots of PowerTop are shown below.
PowerTop Overview
PowerTop Idle Stats
PowerTop Frequency Stats
PowerTop Device Stats
PowerTop Tunables
HTML Report Generated by PowerTop
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Powertop has hw dependency. Only intel machine can get the full functionality. I've been stuck with my AMD Opteron machine. But I don't find better alternatives...shame but powertop is the one.
AMD is to blame there.
Never knew you could manage the power on Linux. I was going to ask a developer to make something. Thanks for introducing me to PowerTop!
I noticed a minor mispaste:
sudo powertop --csv=output.html
should be
sudo powertop --html=output.html.
Otherwise, a great article, thanks for sharing the knowledge!
Fixed. Thanks.
My powertop shows 1.12.
The examples shows 2.1.
Mine does not show options.
But a very nice piece of SW
and I would like to make it work.