powertop - Man Page

a power consumption and power management diagnosis tool.

Examples (TL;DR)

Synopsis

powertop [options]

Description

powertop is a program that helps to diagnose various issues with power consumption and power management.  It also has an interactive mode allowing one to experiment with various power management settings.  When invoking powertop without arguments powertop starts in interactive mode.

Options

--auto-tune

Set all tunable options to their good setting without interaction.

-c,  --calibrate

Runs powertop in calibration mode.  When running on battery, powertop can track power consumption as well as system activity.  When there are enough measurements, powertop can start to report power estimates.  One can get more accurate estimates by using this option to enable a calibration cycle.  This will cycle through various display levels and USB device activities and workloads.

-C,  --csv[=filename]

Generate a CSV report.  If a filename is not specified then the default name powertop.csv is used.  The CSV report can be used for reporting and data analysis.

--debug

Run in debug mode.

--extech=devnode

Use the Extech Power Analyzer for measurements.  This allows one to specify the serial device node of the serial to USB adaptor connecting to the Extech Power Analyzer, for example /dev/ttyUSB0.

-r,  --html[=filename]

Generate an HTML report.  If a filename is not specified then the default name powertop.html is used.  The HTML report can be sent to others to help diagnose power issues.

-i,  --iteration[=iterations]

Number of times to run each test.

-q,  --quiet

Suppress stderr output.

-t,  --time[=seconds]

Generate a report for a specified number of seconds.

-w,  --workload[=workload]

Execute workload file as a part of calibration before making a report.

-V,  --version

Print version information and exit.

-h,  --help

Show the help message and exit.

Commands

In interactive mode, the following key bindings are available:

TabShow next tab
BackTabShow previous tab
Right ArrowScroll to the right
Left ArrowScroll to the left
Up Arrow, PageUpScroll up or select previous item
Down Arrow, PageDownScroll down or select next item
Space, ReturnActivate current item
sSet refresh timeout
rRefresh window
q, Ctrl-C, EscapeExit powertop

Bugs

Send bug reports to powertop@lists.01.org

See Also

The program is more fully described at https://01.org/powertop

Author

powertop was written by Arjan van de Ven, and is currently maintained by Chris E Ferron.

Referenced By

cpupower-monitor(1), powerstat(8), rfkill(8).

2014-08-02 powertop manual System Administration