PowerTOP

About

PowerTOP is a Linux tool that helps you reduce the power consumption while your computer is idle.

PowerTOP has these four basic goals:

• Show how well your system is using the various hardware power-saving features
• Show you the culprit software components that are preventing optimal usage of your hardware power savings
• Help Linux developers test their application and achieve optimal behavior
• Provide you with tuning suggestions to achieve low power consumption

Note: powertop is only supported by v2.6.21 and later kernels

emerge -va powertop

Update your kernel with the following:

No detailed statistics available; please enable the CONFIG_TIMER_STATS kernel option
This option is located in the Kernel Debugging section of menuconfig
(which is CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL=y in the config file)

Suggestions

• Enable the "on demand" CPU speed governor for all processors via:
  

  echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

• Enable the CONFIG_NO_HZ kernel configuration option.
  This option is required to get any kind of longer sleep times in the CPU.
• Enable the CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND kernel configuration option.
  This option will automatically disable UHCI USB when not in use, and may save approximately 1 Watt of power.

See also

• Known issues