1 Building & Installing PowerTOP
2 ------------------------------
4 To build and install PowerTOP type the following commands,
9 Note: For Android (running Intel Architecture ) there is a Android.mk
10 that was provided by community members, and at this time is supported
11 mostly by community members.
16 PowerTOP uses C++, and expects g++ and libstdc++ to be functional
17 along with a glibc/pthreadsi, autoconf, automake, and libtool in the
18 development environment.
21 in addition to that, PowerTOP requires the following components:
23 pciutils-devel (is only required if you have PCI)
24 ncurses-devel (required)
25 libnl-devel (required)
26 kernel version => 2.6.38
31 PowerTOP needs some kernel config options enabled in order function properly.
32 As of linux-3.3.0 these are (list probably incomplete):
35 CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS
37 CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_ONDEMAND
39 CONFIG_SND_AC97_POWER_SAVE
45 CONFIG_EVENT_POWER_TRACING_DEPRECATED
50 The patches in the patches/ sub-directory are required for PowerTOP to function
57 When invoking PowerTOP without arguments, PowerTOP starts in interactive mode.
58 However, for reporting bugs etc there is a special reporting modes:
60 For an HTML formatted report simply execute PowerTOP with the following,
64 which will create a "powertop.html" file which is static and can be sent to
65 others to help diagnose power issues. Additionally has the feature of showing
66 the tunables executions withing the report as a reference.
68 Note for the developers: If you make changes on the report format please
69 make sure that the output can be cleanly validated by the W3C Markup
70 Validation Service and W3C CSS Validation Service:
71 * http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_upload
72 * http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/#validate_by_upload
74 For a CSV formatted report, simply execute PowerTOP with the following,
78 which will create a “powertop.csv” file which is static and can be used in
79 reporting, diagnoses, and analytical data analysis.
81 Also you can set the number of iterations, and duration of test, in which case
82 all reports will time stamp for you.
84 Calibrating & Power Numbers
85 ---------------------------
86 PowerTOP will, when running on battery, track your power consumption as well
87 as your activity on the system. Once there are sufficient such measurements,
88 PowerTOP can start to report power estimates for various activities.
89 You can help get this estimation more accurate by running a calibration
94 at least once; this will cycle through various display brightness levels
95 (including "off") as well as USB device activities and some other workloads.
98 Code from other open source projects
99 ------------------------------------
100 PowerTOP contains some code from other open source projects; we'd like to
101 thank the authors of those projects for their work.
102 Specifically PowerTOP contains code from
104 Parse Event Library - Copyright 2009, 2010 Red Hat Inc Steven Rosted <srostedt@redhat.com>
105 nl80211 userspace tool - Copyright 2007, 2008 Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
108 Extech Power Analyzer / Datalogger support
109 ------------------------------------------
110 I use, and our analysis teams use, the Extech Power Analyzer/Datalogger
111 (model number 380803) quite a lot, and PowerTOP supports using this
112 device over the serial cable. Just pass the device node on the command line
115 powertop --extech=/dev/ttyUSB0
117 (where ttyUSB0 is the devicenode of the serial-to-usb adapter on my system)