Intel Releases PowerTop 1.13 With New Features

While it may have seemed like PowerTop was idling by for a while without a new release or any major advancements to this open-source utility for analyzing power consumption to find programs causing more wake-ups than necessary and to provide other power savings tips on Intel-based Linux systems, a new release has emerged. Intel released PowerTop v1.13 recently and it adds a few new features to the power table along with a number of bug-fixes.

Arjan van de Ven of Intel shares that the new features of PowerTop 1.13 include supporting Run-Time Device Power Management both for recommending it be enabled and to collect RDPM statistics, the ability to report which application is keeping the disk from entering its power-saving mode, reporting of AHCI Link power management statistics, the ability to report audio power saving statistics if an application is preventing the system from putting the audio in a low-power state, and lastly is the ability to report the use of Intel Turbo Mode on modern CPUs like the Intel Core i7 series.

The fixes in PowerTop 1.13 include power-saving suggestions now properly going away when applying them, not turning on USB power management for USB input devices as they have a tendency to break, better reporting of Ethernet activity with multi-queue networking, recognize CPU HPET in timer reporting, and various WiFi power-saving API changes/tweaks.

The latest release of Intel's PowerTop can be downloaded from its web-site at LessWatts.org.