powertop 0.2.2

Small wrapper to use PowerTOP in Python

A wrapper to use PowerTOP easily in Python.

Also provides a command to get the results as JSON.

Install

• install PowerTOP (e.g. sudo aptitude install powertop on Debian-based distributions)
• sudo python3 -m pip install powertop

Short example

Run as root, in a Python 3 shell:

import powertop
import json

measures = powertop.Powertop().get_measures(time=1)

print(json.dumps(measures['Device Power Report'], indent=4))

Or, as a shell command:

sudo python3 -m powertop

Outputs:

[
    {
        "Usage": "66.4%",
        "Device Name": "CPU core"
    },
    {
        "Usage": "66.4%",
        "Device Name": "DRAM"
    },
    {
        "Usage": "66.4%",
        "Device Name": "CPU misc"
    },
    {
        "Usage": "18.8 ops/s",
        "Device Name": "GPU misc"
    },
    {
        "Usage": "18.8 ops/s",
        "Device Name": "GPU core"
    },
 ...

How to use

First, call PowerTOP:

import powertop

measures = powertop.Powertop().get_measures(time=1, iterations=1)

Sections

You can then access sections. They may vary across systems and PowerTOP versions.

On my computer, they are:

• Top 10 Power Consumers
• Processor Idle State Report
• Processor Frequency Report
• Overview of Software Power Consumers
• Device Power Report
• Process Device Activity
• Software Settings in Need of Tuning
• Untunable Software Issues
• Optimal Tuned Software Settings

You can find yours with this command:

sudo python3 -c "import powertop; measures = powertop.Powertop().get_measures(time=1); print(measures.keys())"

Reading sections

Each section is a list JSON-like data (strings, lists and dicts).

Run sudo python3 -m powertop to get a taste of what it looks like.