Building & Installing PowerTOP ------------------------------ To build and install PowerTOP type the following commands, ./configure ./make ./make install Note: For Android (running Intel Architecture ) there is a Android.mk that was provided by community members, and at this time is supported mostly by community members. Build dependencies ------------------ PowerTOP uses C++, and expects g++ and libstdc++ to be functional along with a glibc/pthreadsi, autoconf, automake, and libtool in the development environment. in addition to that, PowerTOP requires the following components: pciutils-devel (is only required if you have PCI) ncurses-devel (required) libnl-devel (required) kernel version => 2.6.38 Build PowerTop for Android LollyPop ------------------------------------ 1. Obtain pciutils and ncurses libraries. Skip this step if they are already in the tree. pciutils: Clone https://github.com/trevd/android_external_pciutils into external/pciutils ncurses: Clone https://github.com/cvpcs/android_external_libncurses into external/ncurses 2. Run ./src/csstoh.sh src/powertop.css src/css.h to generate the css.h header file. 3. Apply patches inside patches/Android 4. PowerTop can be built with top level make, or by doing "mm". The resulting binary is under $ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT/system/bin/powertop Kernel Parameters: ------------------ PowerTOP needs some kernel config options enabled in order function properly. As of linux-3.3.0 these are (list probably incomplete): CONFIG_NO_HZ CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS CONFIG_HPET_TIMER CONFIG_CPU_FREQ_GOV_ONDEMAND CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND CONFIG_SND_AC97_POWER_SAVE CONFIG_TIMER_STATS CONFIG_PERF_EVENTS CONFIG_PERF_COUNTERS CONFIG_TRACEPOINTS CONFIG_TRACING CONFIG_EVENT_POWER_TRACING_DEPRECATED CONFIG_X86_MSR ACPI_PROCFS_POWER CONFIG_DEBUG_FS Use these configs from linux-3.13.rc1 CONFIG_POWERCAP CONFIG_INTEL_RAPL The patches in the patches/ sub-directory are required for PowerTOP to function fully. Outputting a report ------------------- When invoking PowerTOP without arguments, PowerTOP starts in interactive mode. However, for reporting bugs etc there is a special reporting modes: For an HTML formatted report simply execute PowerTOP with the following, powertop --html which will create a "powertop.html" file which is static and can be sent to others to help diagnose power issues. Additionally has the feature of showing the tunables executions within the report as a reference. Note for the developers: If you make changes on the report format please make sure that the output can be cleanly validated by the W3C Markup Validation Service and W3C CSS Validation Service: * http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_upload * http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/#validate_by_upload For a CSV formatted report, simply execute PowerTOP with the following, Powertop --csv which will create a “powertop.csv” file which is static and can be used in reporting, diagnoses, and analytical data analysis. Also you can set the number of iterations, and duration of test, in which case all reports will time stamp for you. Calibrating & Power Numbers --------------------------- PowerTOP will, when running on battery, track your power consumption as well as your activity on the system. Once there are sufficient such measurements, PowerTOP can start to report power estimates for various activities. You can help get this estimation more accurate by running a calibration cycle: powertop --calibrate at least once; this will cycle through various display brightness levels (including "off") as well as USB device activities and some other workloads. Code from other open source projects ------------------------------------ PowerTOP contains some code from other open source projects; we'd like to thank the authors of those projects for their work. Specifically PowerTOP contains code from Parse Event Library - Copyright 2009, 2010 Red Hat Inc Steven Rosted nl80211 userspace tool - Copyright 2007, 2008 Johannes Berg Extech Power Analyzer / Datalogger support ------------------------------------------ I use, and our analysis teams use, the Extech Power Analyzer/Datalogger (model number 380803) quite a lot, and PowerTOP supports using this device over the serial cable. Just pass the device node on the command line like this powertop --extech=/dev/ttyUSB0 (where ttyUSB0 is the devicenode of the serial-to-usb adapter on my system)