Resources System Monitoring App For GNOME Now Displays NPU Usage

[Jumbotron]

Well this is nifty, if a bit useless as of now. But AI is here and it’s getting sprinkled on everything like freshly grated Parmesan on your meal at Olive Garden. Eventually this measurement will be useful. I suppose it could be useful now for development and as a gauge of how well your code is hitting whatever NPU your processor has.

[sophisticles]

I decided to test this for accuracy and learned quite a bit about how Ice Lake's iGPU and hardware encode.decode function with the i915 driver.

At first I thought the app was broken because for decode. i.e. playing video files, using SMPlayer, I was seeing the following results:

MJPEG YUV444, both CPU and GPU usage but no dedicated hardware usage

MPEG4, same as above

AVC, same as above

HEVC HDR10, same as above

VP8, same as above

VP9, same as above

AV1, same as above

ProRes, same as above, this one surprised me, I thought it was CPU only on x86

FFV!, CPU only, as expected

JPEG2000, same as above

Apparently on this system, with this driver and this OS, there is no hardware decode available.

[coder]

Too bad they didn't (couldn't?) use some generic load monitoring facility of the accel subsystem and are relying on an Intel-specific hook.

Load monitoring seems like it ought to be a pretty basic part of that subsystem, which surprises me that it's apparently not a standard/required call for accel drivers to implement.

[coder]

I decided to test this for accuracy and learned quite a bit about how Ice Lake's iGPU and hardware encode.decode function with the i915 driver.

At first I thought the app was broken because for decode. i.e. playing video files, using SMPlayer, I was seeing the following results:

My guess is that the build you're using probably doesn't have support for Intel's hardware decoder compiled-in. Either that, or you need to play with the options so that it gets used.

How did you get SMPlayer on your system and what distro are you using?

[QwertyChouskie]

I prefer Mission Center personally, I like the layout better and it also can manage services. Both are solid options though, much better than GSM.

[Blisterexe]

Looked cool and I wanted to try it around when Fedora 41 came out, but Resources only officially releases as a Flatpak.

what's wrong with flatpak?

[the-burrito-triangle]

I prefer Mission Center personally, I like the layout better and it also can manage services. Both are solid options though, much better than GSM.

I agree, but GSM does do somethings that at least Mission Center doesn't do: like the "properties" window that shows extra details about a process and how it was run. I use that to find pointless services to disable (like avahi-daemon.socket / avahi-daemon.service nautilus' tracker-miner service and related things I don't need or use that come bundled with GNOME).

Also there are a few bugs with Mission Center: like the moving graticules (grid lines) in all the graphs except for the CPU load graph (grid lines should be fixed, not moving). And a few other minor issues (e.g., units and min/max value displayed on each graph) that I should probably make bug reports for.

[the-burrito-triangle]

what's wrong with flatpak?

Flatpak is nice to use for certain things, but for a one-off app (say TLPUI), it downloads a lot of redundant / unneeded crap. I usually use "--no-related --no-deps" options to avoid most of the bloat and delete anything that isn't specifically used / absolutely required by the installed app for my given use-case.

Flatpaks are great if you want to limit access to your filesystem and network/internet (though "unshare --keep-caps -cn <app_name>" works for the latter). Wine is a good example for random apps ran through it that you don't and shouldn't trust (i.e. portable software that may contain malware or obtained illegally and has a virus or whatever hidden in it). Or for apps that add dependencies that you don't want installed system wide like GTK or QT depending on your DE. It also allows you to have a newer MESA version for atomic distros or people running old versions of Fedora or similar point releases.

Overall, though, it is a "fat-suit" and becomes a bit cumbersome to use via the terminal.

[Espionage724]

what's wrong with flatpak?

The entire Flatpak system feels heavy to me, and I haven't needed to entertain it yet (I was on Fedora and didn't want to enable Flathub/etc, and also didn't care for the unofficial Resources Copr)

For Resources specifically, I feel like it wouldn't be too-much effort for distros to include it as a native package in official repos, and I'd prefer to see that!

But on another note, I find it interesting an official GNOME app is choosing to ship Flatpak-only. That's signaling to me a push for Flatpaks, which I ain't into.

[szymon_g]

Looked cool and I wanted to try it around when Fedora 41 came out, but Resources only officially releases as a Flatpak.

The either pack it as an rpm or install the flatpak version.