Ubuntu Manpage: powerstat - a tool to measure power consumption

NAME

       powerstat - a tool to measure power consumption

SYNOPSIS

       powerstat [options] [delay [count]]

DESCRIPTION

       powerstat  measures the power consumption of a computer that has a battery power source or
       supports the RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) interface.  The output is like vmstat  but
       also  shows  power  consumption statistics.  At the end of a run, powerstat will calculate
       the average, standard deviation, minimum, maximum and geometic mean of the gathered data.

       Note that running powerstat as root will provide extra information about process  fork(2),
       exec(2) and exit(2) activity.

OPTIONS

powerstat options are as follow:

-a enable all statistics gathering options, equivalent to -c, -f, -t and -H.

-b redo a sample measurement if a system is busy, the default for busy is considered
less than 98% CPU idle. The CPU idle threshold can be altered using the -i option.

-c gather CPU C-state activity and show the % time and count in each C-state at the
end of the run.

-d delay
specify delay in seconds before starting, default is 180 seconds when running on
battery or 0 seconds when using RAPL. This gives the machine time to settle down
and for the battery readings to stabilize.

-D enable extra power stats showing all the power domain power readings. This
currently only applies to the -R RAPL option.

-f compute an average frequency from all on-line CPU cores. Unfortunately a CPU core
is always active to gather any form of stats because powerstat has to be running to
do so, so these statistics are skewed by this. It is best to use this option with
a reasonably large delay (more than 5 seconds) between samples to reduce the
overhead of powerstat.

-g show GPU power readings. Currently just Intel i915 is supported and one needs to
run powerstat with root privilege to access the kernel i915 /sys debug interface.

-h show help.

-H show histogram of power measurements.

-i threshold
specify the idle threshold (in % CPU idle) to force a re-sample measurement if the
CPU is less idle than this level. This option implicitly enables the -b option.

-n no headings. Column headings are printed when they scroll off the terminal; this
option disables this and allows one to capture the output and parse the data
without the need to filter out the headings.

-p redo a sample measurement if any processes fork(), exec() or exit().

-r redo if system is not idle and any processes fork(), exec() or exit(), an alias for
-p -b.

-R read power statistics from the RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) domains. This is
supported by recent Linux kernels and Sandybridge and later Intel processors. This
only covers some of the hardware in the machine, such as the processor package,
DRAM controller, CPU core (power plane 0), graphics uncore (power plane 1) and so
forth, so the readings do not cover the entire machine.
Because the RAPL readings are accurate and available immediately, the start delay
(-d option) is defaulted to zero seconds.

-s this dumps a log of the process fork(), exec() and exit() activity on completion.

-S use standard averaging to calculate power consumption instead of using a 120 second
rolling average of capacity samples. This is only useful if the battery reports
just capacity values and is an alternative method of calculating the power
consumption based on the start and current battery capacity.

-t gather temperatures from all the available thermal zones on the device. If there
are no thermal zones available then nothing will be displayed.

-z forcibly ignore zero power rate readings from the battery. Use this to gather other
statistics (for example when using -c, -f, -t options) if powerstat cannot measure
power (not discharging or no RAPL interface).

EXAMPLES

       Measure power with the default of 10 samples with an interval of 10 seconds
               powerstat

       Measure power with 60 samples with an interval of 1 second
               powerstat 1 60

       Measure power and redo sampling if we are not idle  and  we  detect   fork()/exec()/exit()
       activity
               sudo powerstat -r

       Measure power using the Intel RAPL interface:
               powerstat -R

       Measure power using the Intel RAPL interface and show extra RAPL domain power readings and
       power measurement histogram at end of the run
               powerstat -RDH

       Measure power and redo sampling if less that 95% idle
               powerstat -i 95

       Wait  to  settle  for  1  minute  then  measure  power  every  20  seconds  and  show  any
       fork()/exec()/exit() activity at end of the measuring
               powerstat -d 60 -s 20

       Measure   temperature,   CPU  frequencies,  C-states,  power  via  RAPL  domains,  produce
       histograms, don't print repeated headings and measure every 0.5 seconds
               powerstat -tfcRHn 0.5

AUTHOR

       powerstat was written by Colin Ian King <colin.i.king@gmail.com>

       This manual page was written by Colin Ian King <colin.i.king@gmail.com>,  for  the  Ubuntu
       project (but may be used by others).

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright © 2011-2021 Canonical Ltd. Copyright Colin Ian King
       This  is  free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO warranty; not
       even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

                                         10 November 2021                            POWERSTAT(8)