Projects

PowerTOP
PowerTOP is a Linux tool that helps you find programs that are consuming extra power when your computer is idle. You can see the power savings immediately within the tool. A lot of the issues have already been found. Learn more about PowerTOP.

Tickless Idle
With the introduction of "tickless idle", the Linux kernel has eliminated the periodic timer tick when the CPU is idle. However, the benefits of tickless idle will not be complete if the CPU is frequently awakened by unnecessary timer events. This project is a collection of variety of kernel enhancements and patches over the basic tickless idle feature that provides incremental power savings.

Applications Power Management
All applications play an important role in overall platform power consumption. The applications seen as CPU consuming in 'top' utility are not the only ones that result in platform power consumption. Other applications, that normally do not consume a lot of CPU time, can impact platform power when they do things like, poll periodically, that is, waking up 20 times a second to see whether there is any work to do.

Processor Power Management
Intel processors support many power management features. This project will be a one stop shop to find out everything you wanted to know about Intel Processor Power Management-related features, solutions, and enhancements that are being integrated into the Linux kernel.

Power and Performance Measurement
The Linux kernel community developers implemented tickless idle and other features to take advantage of the potential of the hardware power savings infrastructure. This project presents the results of implementing specific power saving features on mobile, desktop, and server platforms.

Linux ACPI
The goal of this project is to enable Linux to take advantage of platforms that support ACPI (Advanced Configuration & Power Interface). ACPI has been supported on virtually all high-volume i386, x86_64, and ia64 systems, since 1999. ACPI is an abstraction layer between the OS and platform firmware and hardware. This abstraction allows the OS and the platform to evolve independently. Not only should a new OS be able to handle old hardware, but an old OS should be able to handle new hardware.

ACPICA
The ACPI Component Architecture (ACPICA) project provides an OS-independent reference implementation of the ACPI specification. It can be easily adapted to any host OS. The ACPICA code is meant to be directly integrated into the host OS, as a kernel-resident subsystem. Hosting the ACPICA requires no changes to the core ACPICA code. However, it does require a small OS-specific interface layer, which must be written specifically for each host OS.

BLTK
The Linux Battery Life Toolkit (BLTK) consists of a test framework and six example workloads. The toolkit framework launches the workload, collects statistics during the run, and summarizes test results. The framework could launch any workload, but currently has six example workloads: Idle, Reader, Office, DVD Player, SW Developer, and 3D-Gamer.

Power QoS
QoS power management enables aggressive power management by subsystems while honoring the QoS needs of applications and other subsystems. This project will provide a central place for developing QoS power management infrastructure and applications to do aggressive, but not too aggressive, power management.

Display and Graphics Power Saving
Intel graphics devices, such as the Intel G965 family of chipsets, support many advanced graphics features, and, due to their flexible design, they also support many power saving features. The Display and Graphics Power Saving project aims to minimize graphics power consumption in general and exploit those features, where possible, without sacrificing performance.

Device and Bus Power Management
Devices and Buses are responsible for a significant amount of overall system power consumption. So, it is important to maximize their power savings, while the devices are running and while they’re idle. This project seeks to lower overall system power consumption by making sure that devices and buses in the system are using power appropriately.

Virtualization
The virtualization technology is also a key when reducing power consumption today and in the future. One compelling usage model of virtualization, for example, is server consolidation, which can increase server utilization by deploying multiple applications on a single server. Power management in virtualization is very challenging because we need to actually save power in the real world while maintaining the performance and real-time assumptions of the guests. If guests are aware and capable of power management, for example, we believe that we can further reduce power consumption, by activating such facilities.