Linux beta tester

[guillaumew]

I'd love to have a go with power hog on Linux. On your webpage, you say that you're looking for beta testers. If so, I'm interested!

[ribalba]

Hey, thank you for reaching out. Can you give me a little more context why you want to run power hog on Linux. Do you want to know the energy draw of each process and/or do you want to log your resource consumption into carbonDB?

The reason I am asking is that we are currently developing an extension to power hog under linux called procpower

[guillaumew]

Hello,
I'd like to check the energy consumption of my laptop (as a client) when using different applications / setups.
I might also want to use my laptop to run scenarios (in apps or using a web browser) in order to understand what step is the most impactful client side.

[ribalba]

This is really interesting. Let me diverge a little. Getting good measurements on end devices is really hard as the OS interferes a lot and distorts the energy readings. So if you test two runs and log the energy of the whole machine or even the CPU there will be a huge gitter in the measurements because the OS will do stuff like index some DB, clean up the FS etc ... That is why we have the cluster for repeatable good measurements and have the Green Metrics Tool that sets up everything. So for proper analysis of programs it will be hard to use your laptop. Are you aware of the Green Metrics Tool?

Do you know if your laptop has PSYS

grep -R . /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl*/name 2>/dev/null

For playing around I would probably use perf as it is a lot easier to get values here and is on all major Linux distros.

perf stat -a -I 10 -e power/energy-psys/ -- sleep 20

will give you the machine energy ever 10ms

Otherwise I would probably look at ProcPower if you want to look into the processes in more detail.

PowerHog for Linux is made to push data into CarbonDB and more for logging and not so much for analysis.

Tl;dr

• For proper analysis use the GMT with the cluster
• For playing around and getting a feeling for values use perf
• For detailed analysis on a process level on a device use ProcPower

[guillaumew]

Thanks for your answer. I dont have PSYS on my Laptop.

[ribalba]

You can also use RAPL but this will only give you the CPU energy which is not really a good value if you have mixed workloads.