Wednesday 6 May 2015

powerstat improvements with RAPL

The Linux Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) interface was introduced about 2 years ago in the Linux kernel and allows userspace to read the power consumption from various x86 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) power domains.  The power domains range from the SoC package, CPU core, DRAM controller and graphics power plane.

It appears that the Intel energy status MSRs can be read very rapidly and the resolution is exceptionally good; however, reading the MSR too frequently will consume some power when using the RAPL interface.

I've improved powerstat to now use the RAPL interface with a new -R option (to measure just the total package power consumption).  A new -D option will show all the RAPL domain measurements available.  RAPL measurements are very responsive and one can easily correlate power spikes with bursts of system activity.

Finally, I have added a basic histogram output with the new -H option. This will plot histograms of the power measurements and CPU load from the stats gathered during the powerstat run.

Powerstat 0.01.37 is available in Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf and the source is available from the git repository.

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