NAME

powermon —

display CPU power consumption

SYNOPSIS

powermon [-d device] [-f family] [-h] [-m model] [-t type] [-v vendor]

DESCRIPTION

The powermon utility reads the CPU internal power counters, calculates the current power consumption and displays it on a nice curses interface. What counters are available depends on the CPU.

powermon requires the cpuctl(4) interface to be availble. Access is granted through the read permissions on the /dev/cpuctl* devices.

All necessary parameters are determined at program start via CPUID and MSRs. If some parameters cannot be detemined or the CPU is unknown to powermon they can be overridden with the following options:

-d: cpuctl(4) device to operate on. Default is /dev/cpuctl0. On most CPUs each core is represented by one device, all devices of the same package give the same readings.
-f: CPU family.
-h: Print a short help text and exit.
-m: CPU model, 48 characters maximum.
-t: CPU type, either CLIENT or SERVER.
-v: CPU vendor. Only CPUs with GenuineIntel as vendor string are supported.

COMMANDS

powermon is controlled with interactive keyboard commands. The following commands are supported:

q: Exit the application.

AUTHORS

Yamagi Burmeister yamagi@yamagi.org

Bugs

Currently only Intel CPUs starting with Sandy Bridge are supported. Older Intel CPUs don't have the necessary MSRs, for other vendors the code is missing.

The accuracy of the DRAM counter is highly dependent on the OEM platform. The values may just be garbage.