Live Earth - Power management

Hello all there.

I'm trying to make a small router/firewall running with
OpenBSD but before
setting up this I want to know her electric consummation.

I have recently discover a linux software whose name is:
powertop.
This program can show watt power consummation (it's a ACPI
estimation) but I
don't find it in OpenBSD's ports,

Do you know equivalent or other solutions (Maybe sysctl
sensor) ?

Thanks,


-- 

Can you correct my english !?!!!  ^_^

There are devices out there to measure the consumption of
electric
devices. Just plug it to the input of your computer and you
will get
something accurate, including the energy wasted by the power
unit
itself.

On 7/9/07, f.janczuk <zk.mailinglistgmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all there.
>
> I'm trying to make a small router/firewall running with
OpenBSD but before
> setting up this I want to know her electric
consummation.
>
> I have recently discover a linux software whose name
is: powertop.
> This program can show watt power consummation (it's a
ACPI estimation) but I
> don't find it in OpenBSD's ports,
>
> Do you know equivalent or other solutions (Maybe sysctl
sensor) ?
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> --
>
> Can you correct my english !?!!!  ^_^

On Mon, 9 Jul 2007, Die Gestalt wrote:

> There are devices out there to measure the consumption
of electric
> devices. Just plug it to the input of your computer and
you will get
> something accurate, including the energy wasted by the
power unit
> itself.

Just wanted to say that here in Finland you can borrow such
devices from 
your local electric company for free. But that only gives
you the total
consumption, powertop can show per process information
AFAIK.

-- 
Antti Harri

"f.janczuk" <zk.mailinglistgmail.com> writes:

> I'm trying to make a small router/firewall running with
OpenBSD but before
> setting up this I want to know her electric
consummation.
>
> I have recently discover a linux software whose name
is: powertop.

I don't think there's a powertop port for OpenBSD just yet,
but for
the application you are talking about here, there are a
number of
options for running with less power hungry hardware such as
the units
from soekris or other modest clock speed units.  In general,
for a
routerish unit you could cut significantly on power
requirements by
throwing out the parts you don't need, eg going for serial
console
instead of that graphics card with its own cooling, aiming
for lower
power CPUs and so on.

-- 
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149
implementation team
http://www.blug.lin
ux.no/rfc1149/ http://www.datadok.no/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network
traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after
42673 seconds.

* f.janczuk <zk.mailinglistgmail.com> [070709
05:20]:
> Hello all there.
> 
> I'm trying to make a small router/firewall running with
OpenBSD but before
> setting up this I want to know her electric
consummation.
> 
> I have recently discover a linux software whose name
is: powertop.
> This program can show watt power consummation (it's a
ACPI estimation) but I
> don't find it in OpenBSD's ports,
> 
> Do you know equivalent or other solutions (Maybe sysctl
sensor) ?
> 
> Thanks,
> 

Buy a Kill-a-Watt and get an authoritative measurement. 
Then check all
the other devices and appliances in your home.  It's quite
informative.

Jim

Hi!

On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 11:14:16AM +0200, f.janczuk wrote:
> I'm trying to make a small router/firewall running with
OpenBSD but before
> setting up this I want to know her electric
consummation.
> 
> I have recently discover a linux software whose name
is: powertop.
> This program can show watt power consummation (it's a
ACPI estimation) but I
> don't find it in OpenBSD's ports,
> 
> Do you know equivalent or other solutions (Maybe sysctl
sensor) ?
> 

on the software side, OpenBSD is the best choice if you want
to use an
environmentally friendly operating system:

- the support for power management with APM is excellent,
just have a
look at the apmd(8) "-C" option for the cool
running performance
adjustment mode and all the other features that just work.

- gwk and other developers did a lot of work to support
the serperf
feature on more CPUs.

- ACPI support is getting better, power management is almost
working,
for example with acpicpu(4).

- ...

OK, these features are probably more or less existing in
other
operating systems as well, but OpenBSD is the best choice
for "life
earth" for many other reasons:

- the source tree is very clean and small and we're trying
hard to
remove old and unused code. this reduces wasted CPU cycles,
bandwidth,
and storage. the impact is very big especially if you sum-up
all the
users, mirrors, cvs checkouts, OpenBSD compile farms, etc..
for
example, we removed obsolete protcols like ipx and netiso
and other
ones in the past.
 - or -
- downloading and compiling linux with all the bloat and
dead and code
will increase the global warming!  even a tool like
"powertop" will
not prevent this.

- OpenBSD's packet filter is very fast and it is even faster
since the
c2k7 hackathon because henning mcbride and
others removed many
unneccessary CPU cycles. this wastes less energy and is
better for the
environment...

- there is active work to support bigger filesystems and
volumes, for
example the recent changes to update the disklabels and to
include
ffs2 support in OpenBSD. this will allow to use more storage
with less
hardware (eg. by using huge harddisks in a single server
instead of
many many file servers). less power for a megabyte.

- other developers like art are doing a lot of magique
in the kernel
to improve the performance and to reduce the power
consumption.

- OpenBSD is free of BLOBs, the binary objects as provided
by many bad
vendors. nobody knows what really happens in the BLOBs and
the work to
reverse-engineer at least a few of them showed that they're
burning a
lot energy with a horrible mess of overcomplicated code.

- it is an OpenBSD thing that many developers are active
hikers, for
example in the amazing wilderness of the Rocky Mountains.
the local
albertians like beck and deraadt told us a lot about
behaving
correctly in this protected environment. sadly enough, i've
seen
melting glaciers in the rockies that start to disappear :(

- ...

reyk