[ltp] comprehensive list of things to monitor for battery consumption

Laurent Gilson linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Fri, 21 Jul 2006 19:16:59 +0200


Hello,

> iwconfig <wireless_device>
>     - grep for "Power Management"
>     - shows wireless device's power management state

Try iwpriv. Some driver give you more information that way.

#iwpriv eth0 get_power
eth0      get_power:Power save level: 5 (Timeout 25ms, Period 1000ms)


I donīt think itīs worth to monitor that. Only suspends and reboot change  
that state.

> /proc/acpi/processor/CPU/power
>     - grep for "bus master activity"
>     - shows bus activity (?)

Bus masters are chips that can transfer data from/to RAM w/o asking the  
CPU. The CPU needs to knew about these transfers, because it needs to  
update itīs cache. Bus Master activities prevent the CPU from going to  
sleep, deep sleep, deeper sleep (aka C2, C3, ... C8).

In addition:
load ibm_acpi with experimental=1 and do
"cat /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness| grep level"

Other stuff:

/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
/proc/acpi/ibm/dock
/proc/acpi/ibm/bay
/proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth


/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor <= Because the MHz  
can change very fast. A script catching all these changes would have to  
run very often. Guessing what happend between 2 samples is more accurate  
if you know which governor was in use.

For modified kernels:
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/voltage_table
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/FSB_base_frequency

good luck