Features/PowerManagement

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Contents

Power Management improvements

Summary

Our goal is the improvement of power management especially in regard to userland. This project is based on measurement and statistic of power consumption mainly on laptops. We are trying to locate the main power greedy applications by measuring with new tools, which have been introduced in our project. Our measurements led to tuned daemon which can automatically set the power saving levels.

Owner

Current status

Detailed Description

Power management and power saving in Fedora have been a topic in special areas over the last few releases. Using powertop especially for Fedora 9 quite a few improvements were already done, but there is still lots of things that haven't been touched in regard to power saving.

New packages, which can be used to measure the power consumption of a system, have been introduced:

Also a new package will be able to set the power saving levels:

Benefit to Fedora

Simple: On average use less power for turned on machines while not affecting user experience (a lot ;)).

Scope

Test Plan

The test plan for Test Day could be find here: Test Days

For power measurement

  1. Default installation of a specific release to test
  2. Run several workload tests:
    1. Not logged in, gdm
    2. Logged in, start Firefox, Thunderbird and Openoffice
    3. Run a httpd server on it with a fixed index.html (http://pknirsch.fedorapeople.org/PM/index.html) and run the following script from a separate machine: 
for i in `seq 59 -2 0`; do ab -t $((60-$i)) -c 32 http://myhost/index.html; sleep $i; done > result.txt
  1. For each workload run the following script on the test machine (1): 
for i in `seq 31`; do date; powertop -d -t 60; done > restult.txt
  1. Alternatively you can use the latest version of DeviceKit-power and run the following: 
for i in `seq 31`; do date; devkit-power --wakeups; done > restult.txt

For monitoring application behaviour

  1. Default installation of a specific release to test
  2. Run on of the following tools/scripts:
    1. Powertop or the latest gnome-power-manager to identify application wakeups
    2. netdevstat.stp to identify applications network behaviour (2)
    3. diskdevstat.stp to identify applications disk behaviour (2)

(1) In order to be able to see the actual power usage of the test machine you need to have some form of power measurement equipment. This can be either an external wattmeter or you can use a laptop as testmachine and run the tests on battery power.

(2) Both can be found in the contrib/ directory of the tuned git repo: http://fedorapeople.org/~pknirsch/git/tuned.git/ which can be cloned using git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~pknirsch/tuned.git

Fedora Test Day scheduled for 04/02/2009

In order to allow a larger audience to actively participate we will be holding a Fedora Test Day [1]. We will update the information about the Test Day here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/2009-04-02

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/F11

Functionality test

User Experience

As power saving is not really visible without a measuring it the effects will not be directly visible. So in order to really see the effect you'll either need a laptop and run that on battery power or a wattmeter that is hooked between your system and the power line.

Dependencies

Contingency Plan

Make sure none of the more aggressive power saving features breaks on common hardware and back it out in case it does.

Documentation

Simple user tips for improving power usage

Simple programmer tips for improving power usage

Bugzillas

Release Notes

In order to allow users to monitor the behaviour of their systems and to improve power consumption in general, several improvements were done for Fedora 11:

Users of Fedora 11 should therefore see a reduction in power usage of their system.

Comments and Discussion

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