Thursday 11 June 2015

Adding CPU states and CPU frequency stats to powerstat

During some spare moments I've added a couple of minor CPU related enhancements to powerstat.    The new -c option gathers CPU C-state activity over the run and shows a summary at the end, for example:
 C-State  Resident   Count Latency
 C7-IVB   75.239%   102315      87  
 C6-IVB    0.004%       60      80  
 C3-IVB    0.138%     2892      59  
 C1E-IVB   1.150%     7599      10  
 C1-IVB    0.948%     4611       1  
 POLL      0.000%        3       0  
 C0       22.521%
The above example shows that my Ivybridge i5-3210M spent ~75% of the time in the deepest C7 sleep state and ~22.5% of the time in the fully operating C0 state.

A new -f option gathers CPU frequency statistics across all the on-line CPUs and displays the running average.   This provides an "instantaneous" view of the current CPU frequencies rather than a running average between the last sample, so beware that just gathering statistics using powerstat can cause CPU activity which of course can change CPU frequency.

For a simple test, I ran powerstat for a short 250 second run and normalised the CPU Core Power, CPU Load and CPU Frequency stats so that the data ranges are 0..1 so I can plot all three stats and easily compare them:

One can easily see the correlation between CPU Frequency, CPU Load and CPU core power consumed just from the powerstat data.

Powerstat tries to be as lightweight and as small as possible to minimize the impact on system behaviour.  My hope is that adding these extra CPU instrumentation features adds more useful functionality without adding a larger system impact.  I've instrumented powerstat with perf and I believe that the overhead is sufficiently small to justify these changes.

These two new features will be landing in powerstat 0.01.40 in Ubuntu Wily.

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