Project Members Manish Prasad
Faculty Tzi-cker
Chiueh
Effectiveness of power management schemes vary largely with the underlying hardware energy consumption characteristics. This warrants a mechanism to incorporate the knowledge of hardware energy models into power saving schemes. Furthermore, substantial differences in power consumption of hardware devices on portable computing systems from different vendors demands the ability to learn such energy models automatically as and when hardware configuration changes. A particularly desirable feature would be the ability to do so without the cumbersome use of externally connected measurement devices. WattProbe is an ongoing effort towards building such a mechanism on Linux-based portables. It leverages the hardware enumeration and battery querying capabilities of Linux-based ACPI implementation to achieve the above said goals.
Prototype Implementation
WattProbe prototype is being implemented in the Linux 2.4.20 kernel with ACPI patch (as of 12/12/2002). As it stands now, it involves only minor additions to the kernel proper in the form of hooks into the ACPI battery querying code with the rest of the kernel code in the form of loadable modules. We also hook into the portion of X Server code performing display power management functions.
The experimental platform is currently a DELL Inspiron 2600 running a 1.9 GHz Celeron with following hardware components:
Technical Reports
WattProbe: Automatic Learning of Hardware Energy Models (Work-In-Progress Report)
Manish Prasad, ``WattProbe: Software-based Empirical Extraction of Hardware Energy Models'', Masters Thesis, August 2003.
Links