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We are pleased to announce the release of PowerTOP v2.0
which concludes a major overhaul of the code base, and adds
exciting new features.
About PowerTOP
PowerTOP is a Linux tool to diagnose issues with power
consumption and power management. In addition to being a
diagnostic tool, PowerTOP also has an
interactive mode where you can experiment with various
power management settings for cases where the Linux distribution
has not enabled those settings.
PowerTOP reports which components in the system are most
likely to blame for a higher-than-needed power consumption,
ranging from software applications to active components in the
system. Detailed screens are available for CPU C and P states,
device activity, and software activity.
For many years, PowerTOP has been used heavily by Intel,
Linux distributors, and various parts of the open source
community. We're hoping that our users find the second generation
even more useful for their needs.
Highlights
Release Details
PowerTOP v2.0 has four major thought tracks:
Version 2.0 has several new key features and updates. The first big change is the use of a hardened library called libparseevents, for accessing the kernel "perf" infrastructure. With this enhancement, we are able to provide much more accurate data, and be more flexible with any future kernel development. There has been a great deal of work done in the area of CPU data measurement and diagnostics. Full accurate support was added for CPU idle, frequency, and power traces, along with expanded frequency state reporting for CPUs with more than 10 states. With these additions, PowerTOP v2.0 now gives a clearer picture of how programs affect CPU utilization, and the impact on important power-saving sleep states. PowerTOP v2.0 also includes other key advances, such as
system devices tracking, which gives you clear information on
which devices (if any) are problematic in terms of power behavior,
GPU activity measurements, and VFS opts activity measurements.
This allows PowerTOP v2.0 users a more complete overview of the
system.
In addition to the new features, several enhancements have
been made in these areas:
With all the enhancements and additions, there has also
been extensive work on PowerTOP reports. Reporting has been
highlighted time and time again as a much needed and desired
enhancement. To address all the reporting needs of our users,
PowerTOP v2.0 now runs in two modes: interactive and
noninteractive. This gives you two representations of the data:
static and interactive real-time.
In interactive mode, PowerTOP v2.0 is enhanced with a
redesigned, tab-based user interface with full on-demand window
refresh support. This new UI gives you a clean, organized,
real-time way to visualize and analyze effects on power. Data is
now displayed and organized into tabs:
In the non-interactive mode (aka reporting mode), there
has been a major overhaul in thought and functionality. PowerTOP
v2.0 now allows you to specify not only the duration of each test
measurement cycle, but the number of iterations to measure.
Depending on your needs, PowerTOP v2.0 now produces two different
report formats: HTML and CSV.
Project Details
From a project point of view, there has been several
changes. PowerTOP v2.0 has now been autotooled to support and
increase portability. There is also limited Android make support,
which was completed and spearheaded by community members.
We are also excited to announce that the PowerTOP project
will have a new home on 01.org. This will be the single point for
releases, blogs, and information on PowerTOP moving forward. In
our move to 01.org, we will also be moving and consolidating the
current email lists. Although this is a hassle, it is important to
consolidate the current website, and the two mailing lists, used
for PowerTOP, to their new home on 01.org.
Mailing list:
The development PowerTOP git repositories are hosted at GitHub.
Note: We will not use any of the
integrate, merge, or tracking functions of GitHub, so please
continue to use the provided lists.
Our thanks
For this release, we would like to give a special thanks
to the following contributors, and all contributors to PowerTOP.
Not in any particular order:
Sergey Senozhatsky, Márton Németh, Mike Frysinger, John
Mathew, Thomas Spura, Henry Gebhardt, Jaroslav Škarvada, Anssi
Hannula, Jan Kaluža, Kristen Carlson Accardi, Mikel Olasagasti
Uranga, Jussi Kukkonen.
What’s Next
Moving forward, you can expect more great changes, and
more interactivity. We have plans, ideas, and a newly restored
vigor towards PowerTOP. We will be planning iterative releases,
giving blog updates, and talking contributions, not only in code,
but QA, documentation, and functional suggestions (especially if
the submitter is willing to also code on his/her functional
suggestions). We don’t have a lot of dedicated resources, but we
now have more then we’ve ever had before.
Current v2.1 goals under consideration are:
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